The Bellevue OakDeclining, under active protection

Berlin's Bellevue Palace burned down in the Second World War. One tree from its grounds did not. This pedunculate oak, likely planted around 1752, once stood among a grove surrounding a rococo pleasure palace built in 1766 for a Hohenzollern prince, a building destroyed in 1945 and never rebuilt. It is the last living witness left in what is now Bellevuepark, a public park in Köpenick unrelated to the better-known Schloss Bellevue across the city that today houses Germany's president. At around 270 years old, with a trunk 5.65 metres round, it has spent the last two decades visibly failing. Local papers have covered its condition roughly every five years since 2006, when its heaviest branch first needed a support structure, through a 40 percent crown reduction in 2014 meant to relieve pressure on its trunk, to a protective fence installed in 2015 after district conservationists, arborists and heritage officials agreed the tree needed distance from foot traffic to have any real chance of recovery. This is not a thriving tree. It is a dying one that Berlin has decided, deliberately and more than once, is worth the effort of trying to keep upright anyway, closer to a patient under long-term care than a finished specimen.