The Englischer Garten Wingnut

Berlin protected this tree in 1993 on two stated grounds, Eigenart und Schönheit, character and beauty, and recorded nothing else at all. No age, no girth, no planting date. Natural monument 1-39/B gives a species and a point in the Englischer Garten, and there the paperwork stops. The species carries the rest. Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the Caucasus and northern Iran, where it grows in wet ground along rivers, which makes it an awkward fit for the drier planting beds of Berlin and explains why almost nothing else in the city looks like it. In midsummer it hangs chains of winged nutlets off the branch tips, half a metre long. Berlin's better known wingnut stands across the city on the shore of the Lietzensee, planted in 1927; by the account of the one Berlin writer who went looking for this one, in 2022, this is the bigger of the two, already tall and broad and still filling out. It stands in good company. Ten more protected trees sit within about three hundred metres of it, the Tiergarten's giant sequoia among them, which is a dense run of natural monuments for the middle of a capital city. Nobody has dated it, so nobody can honestly say what it has stood through. If you know when it went in, or you have had a tape around it, tell us.