This pedunculate oak is 4.94 metres round, measured in August 2021, and it stands about thirty metres south-west of the lake rather than on its bank, which is where our map first put it. A reader who knows this park tree by tree told us so, and the survey that measured it says the same. It is one of three big oaks in the Schlosspark and the easiest to walk past. The largest, 5.39 metres, stands at the bridge two hundred metres north; a third, which locals call the Schöne Eiche, grows on the far side of the big meadow from the plane, towards the gate into the old town. This one has no name, no plaque and no path leading to it. It simply stands back from the water, broad and low-limbed, where the grass runs under the crown. It is the common oak of German parkland, and at this girth almost certainly older than the cedars by the palace that carry a planting year. Nobody has dated it. The park was laid out as a baroque garden from 1680 and remade as an English landscape park a century later, and a trunk this wide was either kept through one of those remakings or planted at one of them. No source says which.
About 30 metres south-west of the lake, Schlosspark, Bad Homburg vor der Hohe, 61348 Hessen, Germany You can recognise it by standing at the lake in the southern half of the park: it is the broad oak on the water's edge, the only one of its size down there. The other large oak is at the bridge, two hundred metres north.
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.