Culture : Amid Warsaw’s Dreariness Rests 200-Year-Old Treasure : Lazienki Park with its ancient oak trees has survived Nazi bombs and Communist neglect. It is a place for Chopin on a Sunday afternoon, a place where Poles leave cares behind.

Lazienki Park is a civic treasure nestled amid the postwar Communist concrete of Warsaw. For the past 18 years, Urszula Maciejewska, a diminutive woman with short red hair and enormous energy, has worked as a conservationist in the park and now heads a staff of 40. They are largely devoted to caring for the park’s magnificent trees, some of which, at least in age and size, are thought to be unique in Europe.

Lazienki Park (pronounced wah-ZHINki) is 37 acres of the Polish capital that the Germans failed to destroy in World War II, probably because they envisioned this lovely patch of real estate as the centerpiece of what the Third Reich had planned as a new German city.

Already nearly 200 years old by the outbreak of the war, the park miraculously was spared the bombs and dynamite that reduced 85% of the surrounding city to rubble. Although it was not uncommon for tree surgeons, after the war, to saw into bullets and bomb fragments imbedded in the limbs of ancient oaks, the oaks survived, leaving Warsaw, a city otherwise dominated by dreary pavement, with one of the finest urban parks in Europe.

“The trees got through the war and then through 40 years of neglect by the Communists,” Maciejewska said the other day as she made her rounds through the park. “Perhaps surviving the last 40 years was their greatest accomplishment.”

Indeed, viewed in the context of Communist Eastern Europe, Lazienki Park is particularly special. Neither Budapest nor Prague, cities with prized and graceful architecture, can boast of a park of the quality of Lazienki. Bucharest, in all its disrepair and despite the lunatic reconstruction scheme of the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, retains a few stately neighborhoods, but no really fine parks. For the most part, Communist civic works were confined primarily to monumental statuary and heavy industry. Amenities such as parks were an afterthought.

Lazienki Park abuts the rear of the Belvedere Palace, the seat of the Polish government. For the first years after the war, the Communist regime of Boleslaw Beirut closed off a third of the park to public use, occasionally employing it, according to stories Maciejewska often has heard, as a secret police execution ground. But it was fully restored to public use in the 1950s.

The park has retained an almost Old World feel about it, a place where the grind of life and the traffic of the city seems left behind, where the quiet walkways and benches are populated, on a busy weekday, by mothers with prams and pensioners from the surrounding apartment blocks.

On Sunday afternoons, in summer, Chopin concerts are performed in the formal rose gardens that surround a statue of the composer, born not far from Warsaw. (The statue was destroyed by the Nazis and recast from original molds after the war.) Listeners gather on the benches and stand in the walkways, entranced for an hour as a musician, seated at a grand piano placed near the foot of the statue, plays the composer’s works.

Unlike the urban parks of the West, Lazienki is mercifully free of crime, the homeless, drunken and derelict. In sections it resembles--by design--a natural forest. An almost stately mood prevails, perhaps imparted by the elderly who stroll there as though representatives of a more dignified age.

The acreage that is now Lazienki Park was adjoined to the royal estate of Stanislaw-August Paniatowski in 1772 at a time when Poland, partitioned among the Austrians, the Russians and the Prussians, disappeared from the map of Europe. Paniatowski, a courtier of Catherine the Great, had taken up the current fashions of European nobility and decided to turn what had been a zoo into a royal garden. Over time, artificial lakes were dug, with connecting waterways, and formal homes and conservatories were constructed. But surrounding the homes, ponds and formal gardens, the “natural” woods remained, and so remain today.

“Every spring we plant 30,000 flowers,” Maciejewska said. “In the summer, we plant about 50,000 and then another 10,000 in the fall.” The trees, the park’s real treasure, are given constant attention.

“We have some oak trees that are 300 years old,” she said. “There are ash trees over 200 years old, beeches that are 150, white poplars that are about 180 years old.”

The park’s chestnuts, maples, black poplars and lindens are routinely a century old. White birches, at 50 to 80 years, are relative newcomers, and few will last past 90.

As with the rest of Eastern Europe, unleaded gasoline has yet to make an appearance here, and electricity is provided by coal-burning power plants, laying a pall of pollution over the park. It has taken its toll on the trees, particularly on the spruce and fir trees, but on all others to some degree.

“There is twice as much sulfur dioxide in Warsaw as in rural Poland and 10 times more of other pollutants,” Maciejewska said. “There is not much we can do about it, but it is clear that it makes the trees more susceptible to disease.

“A few years ago, we had many trees in the park drying out. We made some investigation and found the water table was lowering and the water was becoming salty. This was because of the salt used on the streets in the winter. We have problems with water pressure in the park, so we water some trees using portable water wagons.”

To the park’s fond habitues--and Maciejewska counts herself among them--the trees are not merely the backdrop for a pleasant stroll, but as rich with personality as living creatures, some of which she’s helped to nurse through serious bouts of sickness.

She stopped her electric cart beside a 120-year-old beech tree, whose roots, resembling a tangle of elephant trunks, thrust down on one side toward the concrete rim of one of the park’s man-made streams.

“A few years ago,” she said, “this tree was dying on one side because there was an asphalt walkway on the side away from the stream. It could not get water. So we dug up the walkway and planted it in grass.” The beech, with its reddish leaves and a trunk perhaps four feet thick, is luxuriantly healthy now, spreading its limbs over the stream and the graceful bridge that crosses over the shaded water.

In another section of the park is a white poplar tree standing in front of the “little orangerie,” a greenhouse built in the mid-19th Century. Its canopy of shade, at midday, spreads 100 feet. A visitor needs to take 25 steps to walk around its trunk. It is about 80 years older than the building it graces.

A couple of hundred yards away in the center of a broad meadow are two of the oldest oaks in Lazienki Park, a perfectly matched pair, 100 feet apart. They would have been saplings at the time of the birth of Peter the Great in 1672. They are fully leafed and healthy and show no sign of slowing down.

Among Maciejewska’s favorites, though, are the towering ash trees scattered along the sloping land at the park’s southern corner, an area less traveled and wilder than some sections of the park. The ashes, with straight, gray-barked trunks, limbless except for their soaring crowns, stand 80 to 100 feet high.

“This one is the oldest,” she said, stopping before one of them. “It’s about 200, I think, and it’s sick now. You can see, some of the limbs are bare.

“Some of the staff have asked me if we should cut it down, but I don’t want to. As long as it is not endangering anyone, I think we should just let it go slowly and naturally, the way it would if it were a person.”