King Jan's Linden

Local and museum tradition names this lime for King Jan III Sobieski, who built Wilanow Palace in the late 17th century and is documented, in general accounts of the gardens, as having planted lindens on the grounds himself. No source ties this specific tree to that planting, so its age stays undocumented here rather than borrowed from a king's biography, but the name has stuck regardless, one linden singled out among the palace's roughly two dozen protected monument trees. Wilanow's own inventory of its monument trees records 27 of 28 as living in good condition, with only a single dead specimen elsewhere in the gardens, its crown already removed, nothing like the healthy tree this one is described as. It grows on the south side of the main avenue leading up to the palace, close enough to the approach that anyone walking in sees it before they see the building. Wilanow is Warsaw's grandest surviving baroque residence, spared the destruction that levelled most of the city in 1944, and its gardens charge an entry fee, a rare exception among the free public parks the rest of this page favours.