Sixteen cedar seedlings came from Kew and two of them are still standing here. They arrived through Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain, who married Landgrave Friedrich VI Joseph in 1818, brought her own interest in botany with her and kept her English contacts. The pair went into the ground in front of the palace's royal wing in 1822 and have grown side by side ever since. The larger one is the point. It is 6.40 metres round, 21 metres tall, and the city calls it both the thickest and the oldest of its kind in Germany. Its reach is the part that does not photograph: by 2011 the crown measured more than 35 metres from east to west, so the tree is far wider than it is high, with limbs that run out nearly horizontally and then turn up at the ends. Two hundred years is young for a cedar. The species can pass 800, which means this one is barely a quarter through and still thickening. Sources disagree about which cedar it actually is. The city says Atlas cedar, the German tree register says cedar of Lebanon. If you know your cedars, we would like to hear which.
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Getting there
In front of the Konigsflugel, Schlosspark, Bad Homburg vor der Hohe, 61348 Hessen, Germany
You can recognise it by being the wider of two cedars growing together in front of the palace's royal wing, with nearly horizontal limbs spreading more than 35 metres east to west. Nothing else on that lawn comes close.
Free. The Schlosspark is a Hessian state park, open to walk through with no gate and no ticket; the palace buildings themselves are ticketed.
Bad Homburg station is roughly 25 minutes from Frankfurt on the S5, and the Schlosspark is about a ten-minute walk from there.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.