Rus's Oak

In 2019 the Institute of Dendrology at Kornik put a core into this trunk and came back with a number: 800 to 850 years, which makes it the oldest oak anybody has dated in Poland. It is the thickest of the Rogalin oaks as well, 9.15 metres round, a figure carried both by the palace museum's own encyclopedia and by the Poznan tourist board. At nine metres a trunk stops reading as a trunk and starts reading as a piece of the ground standing up. The dating was not the only thing done to it that year. The institute propagated the tree in vitro and the clone, named Rusek, was planted near the palace gate: the same oak genetically, a sapling physically, starting over a short walk from itself. Do not mistake the young one for this one. Eight centuries means it was already a full-grown tree when Poland was partitioned out of existence, and it was still here when the country came back. Its neighbour Lech, ninety metres away, has never been dated at all. Czech, the third of the oaks named for the legendary brothers, died in 1992 and its trunk still stands. The parkland beside Rogalin Palace is free and open, about twenty kilometres south of Poznan. The two living oaks and the dead one sit within a few minutes of each other, so the walk is short and the time goes on standing under this one.