The Oak by the Lake

There are two oaks of this size in the park and nobody has written down which is which. This one is 4.94 metres round, measured in August 2021, and stands at the lake in the southern half of the grounds; the other is 5.39 metres and stands at the bridge two hundred metres north. Both are large enough that a visitor would stop, and neither carries a plaque. That is not a footnote here. A reader sent us the Schlosspark oak with a girth of about five metres, which sits between the two, so the tip could have been either. Rather than pick one and be quietly wrong, both are on the map, and whichever you are standing under, the other is a short walk away. It is a pedunculate oak, the common oak of German parkland, and at this girth it is almost certainly older than the cedars by the palace that have a planting year attached to them. Nobody has dated it. In a park laid out as a baroque garden from 1680 and remade as an English landscape park a century later, a trunk this wide was either kept through one of those remakings or planted at one of them, and no source says which.