The Bildeiche of Albertshausen

Somebody once stole the archangel off this oak. A carved figure of Michael was fixed to the trunk in 1933; it vanished, turned up later in Fulda, and the original now hangs in the church at Albertshausen, with a copy back on the tree. The figure carries a Latin line that translates as "Who is like God?". For a while people called the tree the Michaelseiche after it, but the name never took, and it is still the Bildeiche. It did not grow up alone. The oak stood inside a forest until the wood was cleared around 1810, when it was spared, and it has stood free ever since, in a meadow ringed by a hedge beside the road to the motorway, just outside the village. The trunk is completely hollow, split open on its north side, and its bark is furrowed more deeply than on almost any other oak. The first branches start about four metres up. Rainer Lippert, who measures Germany's monumental oaks, has known it since he was a child and calls it his favourite. He has taped it for thirty years: 7.35 metres round in 1990, in Hans Joachim Fröhlich's measurement, and 7.95 metres in his own of 2021, about 1.8 centimetres a year. He puts it at about 400 years old, 23 metres tall, with a crown 18 metres across. It has been a protected natural monument since 1935.