Dicke Marie

Berlin's oldest tree is older than the city itself. When Berlin got its first written mention in 1237, this pedunculate oak in the Tegel Forest had likely already been growing for over a century, its germination dated to around 1107. How much older it has grown since is a genuine dispute. Forestry officials have long put it at 800 to 900 years. In 2021 the German Dendrological Society's own National Heritage Tree board reassessed the same trunk and came back with a more conservative 500 to 600, arguing that internal decay makes anything more precise a guess. Both numbers can't be right, and this project would rather say so than pick the more impressive one. What isn't disputed: two teenage brothers who summered nearby at Schloss Tegel, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, are said to have named the tree after the family's cook around 1800, and the joke outlived them both. Goethe reportedly rested in its shade in 1778. The oak has grown gnarled and hollow rather than tall, topping out at just 15 to 16 metres, its bulk going into a trunk nearly six metres round instead. On 9 July 2021 it became the first forest tree in Germany named a National Heritage Tree, a small formal honor for something that was already, by any count, the oldest living thing in a city of 3.8 million people.