The Plane of Kinsky Garden

The largest tree on all of Petrin hill also lost its own sculpture to theft. In 1928 the sculptor Karel Dvorak placed a statue called The Fourteen Year Old at the foot of this plane in Kinsky Garden, and at some point in the following decades it disappeared. It now sits in a Prague City Museum storeroom, with a replacement reportedly still planned. The tree itself needed no help to become a landmark: at 28 metres tall with a trunk 546 centimetres around, it is visibly larger than anything else growing across the whole of Petrin, a hill covered in parks. It was planted during the first phase of the garden's construction, which ran until 1836, under a design by the Viennese architect Heinrich Koch for the Kinsky family, and Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 30 July 1998 for its growth, age and dendrological value. In 2004 it was one of thirteen Prague trees chosen for a genetic preservation programme that collects material from the city's oldest specimens before disease or storms can take them. For now it still shades the lower, flatter part of the garden nearest the entrance from Kinskeho namesti, exactly where it has stood for close to two centuries.