Berlin's most famous traffic island holds a 67-metre column, a gilded Victoria and a protected tree from North America. The column itself is a transplant: it was moved here from in front of the Reichstag in 1938 and 1939, when the Nazi planners rebuilt the Grosser Stern as a showpiece junction. Whether this black locust was already growing on the island then, or went in afterwards, no source records. The species has its own long road to Berlin. Robinia comes from the eastern United States and reached Europe in the early seventeenth century, through the Paris garden of Jean Robin, the French king's gardener, whose name the genus still carries. It took to the dry, sandy soils of Brandenburg so well that it now grows wild across them. Its wood is famously hard and its twigs carry paired thorns, and in early summer it hangs out clusters of white flowers that smell of honey and draw bees from a long way off. The island sits in the middle of a busy five-way roundabout. You reach it on foot through the pedestrian tunnels under the traffic, which come up on the island itself. Berlin lists the tree as Naturdenkmal 1-34/B and records nothing about its size or age. If you stand under it with a tape measure, send us the girth.
hanging white pea flowers, strongly scentedFruitAutumn colour
early June, when white flower clusters hang from it and smell of honey
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Grosser Tiergarten, traffic island at the Siegessaeule (Grosser Stern) You can recognise it by the deeply furrowed bark, the paired thorns on its twigs and, in June, hanging white flowers. It stands on the island around the Victory Column, reached through the pedestrian tunnels.
Free; Grosser Tiergarten is a public park open at all hours.
Bus 100 to Grosser Stern; S Tiergarten or S Bellevue about 12 to 15 min walk
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.