The organizers of the European Tree of the Year contest, a relatively niche event on the Brussels social calendar, have been grappling with these questions for years.<\/p>\n
The competition, which started in 2002 as a national event in Czechia before expanding to Europe in 2011, has over the years crowned an Estonian oak that stood in the middle of a football pitch; a lone pine that survived a flood in a Czech village; and a 500-year-old Romanian lime tree that is part of local folk legend.<\/p>\n
The contest\u2019s last four winners, however, all grew in Poland.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom the beginning, the competition was not about the beauty of the trees, but about the stories and the communities. [But] the last four years, it became difficult because it turned into a competition between nations,\u201d said Petr Sk\u0159iv\u00e1nek, who runs the event on behalf of the Environmental Partnership Association, a Czech NGO.<\/p>\n
Poland\u2019s recent success is largely due to Make Life Harder, the country\u2019s most popular Instagram meme account, which has been promoting the contest to its 1.7 million followers since 2021. The enthusiastic response has been both a blessing and a curse. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really good because it can really attract visitors. But any time the website is down, I know it\u2019s because they posted a link to it,\u201d Sk\u0159iv\u00e1nek said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The organizers of the European Tree of the Year contest, a relatively niche event on the Brussels social…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[66,365,669,670,9,370,671,277],"class_list":{"0":"post-655","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-poland","8":"tag-competition","9":"tag-media","10":"tag-michal-wiezik","11":"tag-ngos","12":"tag-poland","13":"tag-social-media","14":"tag-space","15":"tag-spain"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}