Krolevets’ Living Mosaic: An Apple Tree Colony Rooted in Resilience
In the northern Ukrainian city of Krolevets grows a tree that looks more like a low orchard than a single plant. Over more than two centuries, the Apple Tree Colony has spread outwards, taken root again and again, and turned into a living maze of trunks and branches. Today, this national natural monument covers around 0.1 hectares and consists of about 15 trunks – all belonging to one organism.
A Tree That Turned into a Garden
The Krolevets apple tree began life like any other, with a single mother trunk growing in the park of the former Meshchersky princes’ estate. With time, its branches started to bend closer to the ground. Wherever they touched the soil, they slowly rooted and created new trunks linked to the same root system.
Nearby lies a gravestone of Prince Petro Serheev Meshchersky, dated 1780–1848. According to local legend, the tree’s strange habit of bowing to the ground is a sign of mourning for its deceased owner; another version says the prince planted the tree on the grave of his young wife, and that its branches lean down in grief for her.
The original trunk has long since died back, but the colony continues to live on as a dense thicket of intertwined stems. From above, it looks like a small orchard; in reality, it is one tree made up of many trunks. Attempts to transplant it elsewhere have so far failed, and similar self-rooting colonies are not known in other apple trees, which makes the Krolevets tree a true botanical curiosity.
Locals describe the place as having a special energy. Visitors stroll under its low canopy, weave between trunks painted white, and taste its small apples, which are said to be both refreshing and rejuvenating.
History Written in Its Branches
Over its roughly 220-year lifetime, the Apple Tree Colony has stood through regime changes, border shifts and some of the most traumatic chapters of Ukrainian history. The colony has survived two World Wars and the Holodomor famine of 1932–33, which killed millions of Ukrainians. More recently, it has endured the full-scale Russian invasion that began in 2022.
In February 2025, Russian drones fell in the Krolevets community, damaging a local farm and other settlements in the area. And yet, just weeks later, the Apple Tree Colony burst into bloom once again. In April 2025, the mayor of Krolevets announced that the “miracle apple tree” had flowered, calling it a symbol of life, strength and beauty for the region, and one of Ukraine’s natural wonders.
For people in a community living with air-raid sirens and news of fresh attacks, the sight of the old colony covered in white blossom has become more than a seasonal event. It offers a quiet reminder that even under fire, life can root itself, hold on and flower anew.
International Support
In 2023, the colony represented Ukraine in the European Tree of the Year competition and won third place with over 14,000 votes. It has come to symbolise Ukrainian indomitability – a tree whose unusual way of surviving mirrors the determination of the people who live around it.
