The Juniper of the TU Schaugärten
How do I find it? You can recognise it by the blue-green scale foliage and the small waxy berry-cones, the only juniper among these protected trees. It stands at the south-eastern corner of the grounds, towards Altensteinstrasse.
Two official-looking sources quote the same protection number for this tree, 6-77/B-1, and name two different junipers. Berlin's own natural monument register calls it a Virginischer Wacholder, Juniperus virginiana, the eastern redcedar that grows from Nova Scotia down to Georgia. The German Wikipedia list of protected trees in Steglitz-Zehlendorf calls the same entry a Zypressen-Wacholder, Juniperus scopulorum, the Rocky Mountain juniper of Colorado and Alberta. Roughly two thousand kilometres of North America separate them in the wild. That disagreement is not carelessness so much as the nature of the two trees. Both are American junipers with blue-green scale foliage, shreddy bark and small waxy berry-cones instead of woody ones, they hybridise freely where their ranges meet, and telling them apart in a garden is a job for someone holding a hand lens rather than a clipboard. It stands at the southern edge of the old Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian gardeners' school that occupied these grounds from 1903 to 1966, near the Altensteinstrasse side. A teaching collection is exactly where an unresolved American juniper would end up, and exactly where the label matters. Berlin protected it on 2 March 1993 and has never published an age or a girth for it. If you can settle which juniper this is, from the foliage or the cones, we would rather have your answer than pick one.
- Species
- Juniper (Juniperus virginiana or Juniperus scopulorum; sources disagree on which)
- Age estimate
- Location
- TU-Schaugärten (former Königliche Gärtnerlehranstalt), Königin-Luise-Straße 22, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem (Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf)
- Access
- Free, TU Berlin's own Schaugärten (educational display garden, restored 2012-2014); TU Berlin's own site gives seasonal opening hours (April/May and Sept/Oct roughly 10am-8pm, June-Aug roughly 10am-10pm); no confirmed winter access found, so treat as a growing-season destination
- Getting there
- Podbielskiallee or Dahlem-Dorf (U3), roughly 10 min walk
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Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
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