The Oak between the Neuer See and the Landwehr Canal
This oak grows on a strip of park squeezed between two kinds of water: the Neuer See on one side, the Landwehr Canal on the other. One is a park lake, with rowing boats in summer. The other was dug between 1845 and 1850 to carry barges around the crowded Spree, and still carries tour boats past the zoo today. It is a pedunculate oak, the common oak of the north German lowlands, and probably the single most useful tree a park can hold. Oaks support more insect life than almost any other European tree, and the insects feed the birds: woodpeckers, nuthatches and jays all work an old oak. In a good year the ground beneath it fills with acorns on long stalks, the peduncles the species is named for, and jays carry them off, bury them and forget a good share. Berlin protects it as Naturdenkmal 1-88/B, and a volunteer photographing the city's natural monuments for Wikimedia Commons left ten pictures of it, all taken within a few metres of the trunk. What nobody has written down is how old it is or how big. If you walk the strip between the lake and the canal, a girth measurement would tell us a great deal.
catkins hang before the leaves are fully outacorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in themAutumn colour
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Grosser Tiergarten, between Neuer See and Landwehrkanal You can recognise it by the acorns hanging on long stalks and the short-stalked, round-lobed leaves. It stands on the strip of park between the Neuer See and the Landwehr Canal.
Free; Grosser Tiergarten is a public park open at all hours.
S/U Zoologischer Garten about 10 min walk
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.