The Giant Sequoia of the Tiergarten

A tree that can live 3,000 years in California has had 135 of them in central Berlin. This giant sequoia, planted in 1891 in the Englischer Garten section of the Tiergarten, arrived in Europe only decades after the species itself did: the first seeds reached the continent in 1853, imported from California just two years after the tree was formally described at all, setting off a brief craze among wealthy estate owners for what nurseries of the time marketed as Wellingtonia. Berlin's planting, in the city's largest and most central park, is modest by the standards of a species that can exceed 90 metres in its native range, but it remains one of the tallest and bulkiest conifers growing anywhere in the capital. It stands a short walk from Schloss Bellevue, the German president's official residence, in a section of the Tiergarten deliberately landscaped in the looser, informal English style rather than the geometric French gardens found elsewhere in the park. Two world wars swept through the Tiergarten in the twentieth century, and postwar Berliners felled most of the park's remaining trees for firewood during the famine winters that followed 1945. This sequoia, planted decades earlier by gardeners with no idea what the century ahead held, made it through anyway.