What is the oldest tree in Bamberg?
None of Bamberg's four protected trees has a measured age, so there is no confirmed oldest. The strongest circumstantial case belongs to the Linden of the Old Rothof, a small-leaved lime standing where a manor demolished in the mid-1960s once stood, on the hillside above Wildensorg. That is a place, not a date: nobody has cored the trunk or found a planting record, and the city's own register gives only a location and a protected status. If you know how old any of Bamberg's four actually are, tell us.
Bamberg's Naturdenkmal-Verordnung, passed in November 1995 and amended in 2007, protects trees across the city and its outskirts and dates almost none of them. Each register entry carries a number, a common name, a location and the fact of protection: enough to stop a tree being felled, nothing about when it was planted or how old it has grown. The four trees on this page were cross-checked against Wikipedia's own reproduction of the register and against independently dated, geotagged photographs on Wikimedia Commons, which confirm each tree alive as recently as 2017 to 2023 and pin its position to within a few metres. Three stand within about a kilometre and a half of each other on the wooded hillside above Wildensorg: two limes by a spring, an oak on a lane the register calls the Teufelsgraben, and a third lime on the site of a demolished manor. The fourth stands alone by the Regnitz, a few kilometres downstream in the village of Bug. None carries a girth measurement either. A tape measure would tell us more than the register ever will.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.