The Swamp Cypress of Charlottenburg

A swamp tree from the American South has spent two centuries in a Prussian palace garden. This bald cypress, native to the flooded river bottoms of the southeastern United States, went into the ground in Schlosspark Charlottenburg around 200 years ago, most likely during Peter Joseph Lenné's redesign of the grounds into an English-style landscape park. It has grown to five metres around and over 15 metres tall, dropping its needles every winter like a deciduous tree despite being a conifer, a habit that confuses first-time visitors expecting evergreen. Berlin protects it as a natural monument for a reason that has little to do with its size: its aging, partly hollow wood now shelters the hermit beetle, a rare, EU-protected species that depends on old, decaying timber exactly like this to survive at all. You are now more likely to help that beetle by leaving a tree standing than by planting a new one. The palace itself, the largest surviving Hohenzollern residence in Berlin, charges admission for its state rooms, but the gardens are free and open daily, the formal French parterre near the palace giving way further back to Lenné's looser, English-style paths, where this cypress stands among other 19th-century imports the royal gardeners tested against Berlin's winters. Most of them did not last two centuries. This one has.