The Twin Beech of Hvezda

One of the two tallest trees on this page stands on a 17th century battlefield and splits into two trunks a few feet off the ground, which is why it is simply named Twin Beech. At 45 metres it beats every other tree here for height by a wide margin, in the Star Game Reserve on Prague's western edge, where the armies of the Bohemian Revolt collided with the Habsburgs in 1620. The beech itself came generations later, planted sometime after 1763, when the reserve was restored and replanted with beeches, oaks and hornbeams following decades of neglect. Its trunk, 508 centimetres around where it forks, now carries a binding to keep the two main stems from splitting apart under their own weight, and a wooden fence around its base, installed after years of visitors carving initials and hearts into the bark. Prague declared it a protected natural monument on 22 August 2001. It stands about 170 metres from the reserve's Brevnov Gate, in sight of the star shaped Renaissance hunting lodge the whole park is named for, a building that has watched over this beech's entire two and a half centuries of growth without ageing anywhere near as gracefully itself.