Niemcewicz's Walnut

A black walnut, a species more at home on the eastern seaboard of North America, grows by a Polish palace named for a man who spent time in exile there. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, writer, playwright and a companion of Tadeusz Kosciuszko through Poland's failed 18th century uprisings, owned this estate from 1822 and built a library on it; the poet Juliusz Slowacki visited in 1830 and admired what he found. Polish Wikipedia's own article on the palace, citing Warsaw city hall's register of natural monuments, confirms the walnut by name as a protected specimen, and a 2023 photograph on Wikimedia Commons shows it still standing that year. No source dates its planting to Niemcewicz's own tenure, so this page states the naming rather than inventing a birth year to match it. The building passed through several owners after him and has belonged to Warsaw's agricultural university since 1956, its grounds closed to outsiders for decades until the terraced garden behind the palace reopened to the public in 2025, free, after nine years of local campaigning. The tree that outlasted every one of those owners is now something almost nobody who planted it could have counted on: visible again.