The Plane Tree of Budatín Park

Two planes stand at the southwestern corner of Budatín Castle's wall with their roots grown into each other. One of them represented Slovakia at a European contest. The other has been struck by lightning and is being worked on from the inside by a wood-rotting fungus. The healthy one is the larger of the pair and the biggest of several planes in the park: 603 centimetres round, 27 metres tall, about 270 years old. It won Strom roka, the national tree of the year vote, in 2016, and came ninth of sixteen at the European Tree of the Year contest the following year. Its planting comes with a date and two names attached, which is unusual for a tree this old. In 1745 Count Ján Sunyog brought a gardener called František Roder over from Silesia to lay out the grounds around the castle, and this plane went in as part of that work. It has stood against the same wall ever since, through every change of owner and every change of use the castle has been put to. The park lies where the Kysuca runs into the Váh, on the northern edge of Žilina. It is open public ground, free, and a short walk or local bus ride from the railway station.