The Insurgents' Linden (Lipa Powstańców)

Three saplings went into one grave in 1863, and they are now a single tree. On the night of 23 to 24 January that year, at the opening of the uprising against Russian rule, Russian soldiers killed three insurgents from Radomsko. They were buried together in the town's Old Cemetery, and three small limes were planted over them. The stems thickened, met and fused. What stands opposite the Chapel of the Dying Jesus now reads as one trunk, 5.33 metres round at chest height under 23 metres of tree. The dates disagree slightly. The tree's own record gives the 1863 planting and ties it to the burial; the town's register of natural monuments enters its year of origin as 1860. Either way it is about 165 years old, the oldest and thickest tree in Radomsko, and one of thirteen protected natural monuments in the town, every one of them a tree. The protection itself came late, in July 1998. Age has cost it. Storms took most of the crown, which is down to two main limbs spreading barely twelve metres. Rather than fell it, the town spent 2021 and 2022 on surgery: corrective pruning, work inside the trunk, a living brace, steel bindings and a reinforced concrete pylon, partly to stop the whole thing coming down on the chapel it has stood beside since the funeral. The finished tree was formally unveiled in May 2023.