Radó Dezső: Parks and Forests - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1992)

ing a green park. There are 10,029 trees in all. Most of these are not “native” and no old trees of several hundreds of years in age can be found. The earlier vegetation was destroyed by the floods of 1267 and 1838. (The former is mentioned in the Ráskai codex. Lea Ráskai was a Dominican nun living on the island from 1510 to 1522. She collected and recorded the legends of St. Margaret. Five of her codices were preserved.)

The tree population is dominated by plane trees. Planes are not natives either, although some 15 million years ago in the Miocene time they were present in Hungary, but later the ice Age swept them out. The modern trees were raised in the nurseries of the 19th and 20th centuries. After the flood of 1838 Palatine Joseph and later his successor planted plane trees on the island. Most of these trees came from the family’s estate in Alcsút. The most impressive is the giant speThe colourful tulip garden of Margaret Island

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