The White Mulberry of Senica

A white mulberry in the middle of Senica carries two titles most trees never get to hold: the town's own Tree of the City, and a national Tree of the Year champion four years later. Senica declared it the town's tree in 2010, and in 2014 it went on to win Slovakia's Strom roka contest outright with 1,711 public votes, before representing the country at the European final in 2015 and finishing eighth of fourteen with 6,776 votes, a genuinely large turnout for a mulberry from a town of nineteen thousand people. At the time of its national win it was put at 200 years old, 20 metres tall and 355 centimetres round, so it stands today at roughly 210 years, a Morus alba old enough to have outlived several generations of the townspeople who grew up around it. That is the tree's whole appeal, in fact: locals describe it less as a landmark than as a fixture of ordinary life, something people who grew up nearby measured their own childhoods against, nicknamed locally as a beacon of the past. It carries none of the drama of a battle survivor or a royal planting, just decades of a town centre growing up around one very old fruit tree that kept fruiting anyway. It stands in the inhabited heart of Senica, in western Slovakia, publicly visible with nothing blocking access, an easy walk from the town's own bus and train station.