This oak has no plaque, no register entry and no date, and it may be the finest tree in the park. It is about five metres round and, by the estimate of the reader who knows this park trunk by trunk, around 36 metres tall, which would make it the tallest tree measured anywhere in the Schlosspark. He calls it the Schöne Eiche, the beautiful oak, and the name is about the crown rather than the girth: huge, whole and unusually vigorous, without the dead limbs and storm scars that most old oaks carry. It is the third of the park's big pedunculate oaks. The widest, 5.39 metres, stands at the bridge; a second of 4.94 metres stands back from the lake in the south. This one grows on the far side of the big meadow from the plane, towards the gate into the old town, so the walk between the plane and the gate passes straight under it. Nobody has dated it. The ground has been garden since 1441, baroque from 1680 and an English landscape park a century after that, and an oak of this size was either spared through one of those remakings or planted in one. No source says which, and neither do we. If you have a tape measure and a free afternoon, the girth is the number we would most like to have confirmed.
Near the gate to the Altstadt, across the big meadow from the plane, Schlosspark, Bad Homburg vor der Hohe, 61348 Hessen, Germany You can recognise it as the big oak on the far side of the meadow from the plane, on the path towards the gate into the old town: a full, unbroken crown with none of the dead limbs the park's other old oaks carry.
Free. The Schlosspark is a Hessian state park, open to walk through with no gate and no ticket.
Bad Homburg station is roughly 25 minutes from Frankfurt on the S5, and the Schlosspark is about a ten-minute walk from there.
