Eiche am Forsthaus Gruener Jaeger

A tape measure around this oak's trunk reads 8.91 metres, and dendrologists reckon that puts it at roughly 450 years old. Locally it is still sold as the '700-jaehrige Eiche', the 700-year oak, a name the two specialist registers that measured it do not support. Nobody seems in a hurry to correct the sign. It stands hollow to the ground in a forest clearing beside the Gruener Jaeger forestry lodge outside Stapel, its base gnarled and split by an old lightning scar. Storm Xavier tore off two of its three main limbs in October 2017. Rather than dying back, the tree pushed out a new secondary crown, and a 2023 survey of its condition called it damaged and recovering rather than dying. For most of its life almost nobody outside Stapel knew it existed. Around 2006 a tree enthusiast from Wernigerode tipped off the German Tree Archive, and it has been on the specialist registers ever since. The village around it has moved faster than the tree: Stapel belonged to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern until a 1992 municipal vote shifted it into Niedersachsen, a state border redrawn well within this oak's own lifetime. The municipality of Amt Neuhaus now lists the tree among its own excursion destinations, reached on a signposted track uphill from the village.