The Oak with the Bizarre Trunk of Na Cibulkach

Czech conservation law has an official name for this tree, and the name is the oak with the bizarre trunk. It earns it. The trunk swells like a barrel, 525 centimetres round, then tapers and breaks into a crown so modest that the whole tree stops at 17 metres. Oaks that thick are usually far taller. This one put its two centuries into width. It went into the ground around 1815, in the landscape park laid out at the Cibulka estate, and it has outlasted what it was planted for. The house above it is a ruin. The wood around it became the Kosire-Motol nature park in 1991, and Prague's register of protected trees added the oak itself in March 2008. A survey in 2016 taped the trunk at 525 centimetres and the register's 2024 refresh carries the same number to the centimetre. That survey called the tree's condition deteriorated, which on an oak of this age describes a stage rather than an ending; the register still lists it as standing. Nobody has counted its rings, so the two centuries come from that planting date and should be read loosely. Ninety metres away stands the park's other registered oak, taller, slimmer and cracked down one side. Seeing them within five minutes of each other is the argument for coming out to Kosire at all: same park, same decade, two completely different animals.