The Copper Beech of the Fraenkel Garden

Berlin declared this copper beech a natural monument in 1993, growing inside Landhausgarten Dr. Max Fraenkel, a garden the banker Fraenkel commissioned around 1930 on the Havel shore at Kladow, on ground that had been a brickworks. He hired Erwin Barth, then the city's director of gardens, who laid out a formal rose garden, a perennial-lined cascade and fruit and vegetable plots close to the house, then a looser landscape section further out with a waterfall, ponds and a tea pavilion. The garden changed hands and use across the rest of the century before Spandau's district authorities restored it and reopened it to the public in 2016, with a visitor centre standing where a private family once entertained guests. The beech carries the register's protection for beauty and local historical interest, but no source yet gives its age or girth, so both stay open questions for whoever measures it next. It stands somewhere within the garden's 2.97 hectares, free to walk and easy to reach from central Berlin, on the same route the BVG ferry and the weekend cyclists take out to Kladow. Its crown, dark purple against the garden's greens, is one more layer in grounds that were built up in stages across nearly a century.