The Swiss Stone Pine of the TU Schaugärten

A Swiss stone pine belongs at two thousand metres, on the Alpine treeline, in the last thin band of soil before the rock wins. This one is growing on Berlin sand at fifty metres above sea level, and it has been doing it since 1903. That date is not a guess from the garden's founding. TU Berlin, whose vegetation technology department runs these grounds, says of the Pinetum framing the old rose garden that its Oriental spruce, its Zirbelkiefer and its Weymouth pine still date from 1903, naming the species one by one. Counting forward puts this pine at roughly 120 years, which for a species that regularly passes five hundred in the Alps is early middle age. The Zirbelkiefer arrived here as teaching material. From 1903 until 1966 the site was the Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian state's school for gardeners, and a conifer collection was a working textbook. In the Alps this tree feeds an entire economy of its own: the nutcracker bird buries its seeds and forgets enough of them to plant the next forest, and what the bird misses goes into schnapps. A storm in February 2022 took two trees over a hundred years old off these grounds, and the account of it names neither. This Zirbelkiefer was still standing in November 2024, a hundred and twenty-one growing seasons after it was put in.