On the night of 15 January 1919, Freikorps soldiers shot Karl Liebknecht in the dark beside the Neuer See and reported that he had been killed trying to escape. A memorial stone by the lake marks it now. This London plane stands a short walk east of the water, south of the Grosser Weg, and nobody has recorded whether it was there to see any of that. What it is, at least, is easy to say. The London plane is a city tree by temperament: it sheds its bark in flat plates, which is one reason it shrugs off soot and exhaust, and the shedding leaves a trunk patched in olive, cream and grey like old camouflage. In winter it keeps its seed balls, bristly brown spheres on long threads that hang on after the leaves have gone. Berlin planted the species along its streets by the thousand. Here, among the lawns and paths east of the lake, it has room to spread. The Neuer See is one of the busiest corners of the Tiergarten, with a beer garden and rowing boats on the water, so this is a tree a lot of people walk past without knowing the city lists it. It is Naturdenkmal 1-56/B. The register gives no age, girth or height. If you put a tape around the trunk at chest height, tell us what it says.
bristly seed balls hang on through winter, long after the leaves have goneAutumn 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, east of the Neuer See (south of Grosser Weg) You can recognise it by the bark coming off in plates, leaving the trunk patched cream, olive and grey. It stands east of the Neuer See, just south of the Grosser Weg, about 200 metres from the protected plane at Lichtensteinallee.
Free; Grosser Tiergarten is a public park open at all hours.
S Tiergarten about 15 min walk, or S/U Zoologischer Garten about 12 min walk
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.