Nobody has dated this oak, and it is probably the oldest thing in the park. It is 5.39 metres round and 25 metres tall, measured in the autumn of 2021 by the dendrologist who catalogued this park's big trees, and that girth puts it well past the cedars that have a planting date on them. It stands just left of the bridge at the north end of the pond, on ground that has been garden since at least 1441, when a garden is first recorded beside the castle here. The park was laid out as a baroque garden from 1680 under Landgrave Friedrich II and remade as an English landscape park from the later eighteenth century, which is the style it still wears: grass, water, and single large trees given room. An oak this wide was either kept through one of those remakings or planted at one of them. We would like to know which, and so would anyone standing under it. If you have a source for its age, a plaque, a park survey, a local record, tell us and we will put it on the page.
From people who stood here
No notes yet
Did you visit the tree? Leave a note for the next visitor.
Getting there
Left of the bridge at the northern end of the pond, Schlosspark, Bad Homburg vor der Hohe, 61348 Hessen, Germany
You can recognise it by standing at the bridge over the north end of the pond and looking left: it is the broad oak immediately beside the bridge, a good deal thicker through the trunk than any other oak on that side of the water.
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.
In fruit
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
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.
