The Cut-Leaf Oak of Pfaueninsel

Forty five metres from Pfaueninsel's Great Oak stands a second, stranger oak that Berlin protects for an entirely different reason. Where its famous neighbour earned Naturdenkmal status for size and disputed age, this one is registered for rarity alone: a cut-leaf sessile oak, Quercus petraea var. laciniata, a naturally occurring variety with deeply dissected, almost fern-like foliage instead of the plain oval leaf every other oak on the island carries. The two trees stand close enough that a visitor could assume the register was describing the same tree twice. It is not. The government ordinance that protects both lists them under separate numbers, at separate coordinates, for separate reasons, one for its bulk, the other purely because its leaf shape almost never occurs in the wild. No age is recorded for this one at all, since rarity rather than antiquity is the whole case for protecting it, and no source beyond the designation record itself has been found describing this specific tree. Find the Great Oak first, then look forty five metres further for its odd, deeply cut cousin, the rarer of the two despite standing in its more famous neighbour's shadow.