Seasons1 of 4
A crack runs up to eight metres down one side of this oak, and the conservation register still lists it as standing. Prague's database has carried the tree since June 2007 and refreshed the entry in August 2024, hollow and vertical split and all. It went in around 1820, when the Cibulka estate above Kosire was being laid out as a landscape park. The estate house is a ruin today. The park outlived it and was made the Kosire-Motol nature park in 1991, which is how an oak planted for one family's private view ended up on public ground. Neighbouring trees shade it and it has grown accordingly, upward rather than outward, with a long straight trunk that forks into three branches high overhead and carries a narrow crown to 24 metres. Round the trunk it measures 408 centimetres, which is a serious oak anywhere else and the slimmer of the two here. Its registered neighbour 90 metres away, planted at about the same time, reaches 525. The numbers say the crack has not finished it. A tape put round the trunk in 2011 read 394 centimetres; the register's 2024 update reads 408. Fourteen centimetres in thirteen years is a tree still laying down wood. Nobody has cored it, so the age is not a measurement. The register dates the planting to about 1820, which puts the tree near two centuries.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Lesopark Na Cibulkach (Prirodni park Kosire-Motol), south side of the path extending U Cibulky street near a crossroads, 150 00 Praha 5-Kosire
You can recognise it by the long straight trunk, 408 centimetres round and split by a long vertical crack, forking into three branches high overhead. It stands south of the path; the oak 90 metres away is barrel-shaped and much wider.
Free, public forest park (Prirodni park Kosire-Motol, designated 1991), open at all times
Bus to Kosire, then a short walk into the Cibulka estate parkland
In fruit
September to October: acorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in them
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
- In the official register: Ústřední seznam ochrany přírody (AOPK ČR)
- drusop.nature.cz
- cs.wikipedia.org
