The Plane of Kampa

A countess planted this tree in 1813 to dress up her family's riverside garden with something exotic, and it has outgrown every other reason anyone remembers her. Barbora Kolowratova Krakovska had the grounds beside the Vltava planted with foreign flowers and trees that year, and this plane is the clearest survivor of her garden, now absorbed into Kampa Park. It reaches 35 metres, taller than most buildings on the island, with a trunk 504 centimetres around, and it anchors the northern end of the park right where visitors enter from beside the Liechtenstein Palace. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 8 October 1998. Its exact planting date is one of the more solid facts on this list. Most of Prague's old plane trees carry an estimated age with a decade or two of margin either side; this one has a year, because someone wrote it down at the time. Kampa itself was still gardens and orchards when the tree went in, well over a century before the 1947 to 1948 landscaping that turned the island into the public park it is today, which means the tree predates the park built around it by more than a hundred years.