The Chudobín Pine

The village this pine is named after lies under the reservoir it now looks down on. When the Vír dam filled in 1957, Chudobín and the Hamr weir below it went under, and the rocky spur the tree had rooted on became an island. It stayed. Seven decades on it took the national Tree of the Year vote in 2019, then won European Tree of the Year 2020 with 47,226 votes, the first Czech tree to do it. It was nominated by Milan Peňáz, who had lived in the drowned village. How old it is depends on who measured. A 2019 assessment by Mendel University's forestry faculty put it at 300 to 350 years. A later one by the river authority, Povodí Moravy, suggested more than 500. Neither can settle it: the trunk is hollow inside, and a ring count needs wood that is still there. What the wind and the rock made of it is easier to see. The trunk grew in an S, bent by the gales that come down the valley and by the stone it had to work around. Roots lie bare across that rock, submerged when the reservoir is high and more than twenty metres above the water when it is low. Thirteen metres tall, 188 centimetres round, rated healthy in every assessment so far, though drought and the moving waterline have told on it. You view it from the far bank. Nobody walks out to it, and those roots are the reason.