The Giant Thuja of the TU Schaugärten

Germans call this species the giant tree of life, Riesen-Lebensbaum, and Berlin used exactly that name when it put this one under protection as natural monument 6-76/B-2 on 2 March 1993. The register offers the name and no measurement, so treat the word giant as the species talking rather than a surveyor. The species earns it at home. Thuja plicata grows in the wet coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest, where it passes sixty metres and a thousand years, and where the coastal nations of British Columbia built canoes, longhouses, boxes and woven clothing out of a single tree. Almost nothing else on that coast rots as slowly. European nurseries wanted it from the 1850s onward, and a Prussian school for gardeners was precisely the sort of address that would take one. This tree stands in the front garden of the former Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the teaching institute that ran here from 1903 to 1966, beside the yew protected on the same day. Close up it is unmistakable: flat fanning sprays of scale leaves, fibrous bark running in vertical ribbons, and a pineapple smell when you crush a sprig. Nobody has recorded its age or its girth. Both are the kind of thing a visitor with a tape measure could settle in a minute.