The Dziadek Oak

Wroclaw's oldest tree is called Grandpa and it is held together with steel. Dziadek is reported at somewhere between 440 and 460 years old, which puts its start in the era when this was Habsburg Breslau, and its trunk now carries damage serious enough that the branches are reinforced with elastic bindings and clamps. The measurements tell the same story from another angle: 652.5 centimetres round in 2019, up from 629 in 2015, against a height of only 17 metres, the shortest and thickest of the four oaks on this page. A trunk that wide under a crown that low is what a very old tree looks like once it has begun losing its upper limbs. It has been a protected monument since 16 February 1953, decision 2/53. What it has stood through includes the Prussian takeover of Silesia, two centuries of German Breslau and the eighty-day siege of 1945 that left most of the city in ruins and changed both its country and its language. It stands on the public pavement of ul. Kopernika, in front of a training centre but not inside its grounds, on the edge of Park Szczytnicki. Poland's register records the protection and nothing about the tree's size; those numbers come from a survey of the island's monument trees.