The Weymouth Pine of the TU Schaugärten

This species was once a strategic asset. Eastern white pine grew straight and tall enough to mast a warship, so the British crown reserved the best New England specimens for the Royal Navy and branded them with a broad arrow, which colonists resented enough to riot about in 1772. Europe got its own trees instead, and named them after Lord Weymouth, who planted them at Longleat in the early 1700s. Germany still calls the species Weymouth-Kiefer. This one dates from 1903. TU Berlin, whose staff maintain these grounds, records that the Pinetum around the old rose garden still holds its original Oriental spruce, Zirbelkiefer and Weymouth pine from that year, naming the three species directly, which puts this tree at roughly 120 years. That is the same year the Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt opened here, the Prussian school where gardeners were trained until 1966. Berlin protected it on 2 March 1993 as natural monument 6-84/B. It stood through the Battle of Berlin, the closing of the school in 1966 and the long stretch afterwards when these grounds were no longer anyone's classroom, until TU Berlin restored them between 2012 and 2014. A storm in February 2022 brought down two trees over a hundred years old here; the account does not say which two. This pine was photographed standing in November 2024.