The Zehlendorf Peace Oak

This oak was planted to mark a battle, one year to the day after it was fought. On 2 September 1871, the first anniversary of the Prussian victory at Sedan, a young pedunculate oak went into the ground at Zehlendorf's village crossroads and called it a Friedenseiche, a peace oak, for the end of the Franco-Prussian War. A bronze plaque on the south side of the trunk still says so. That makes it one of the few trees on this map with a birthday. It is about 155 years old, and it has had a busy junction for company the whole time. Beside it stand the old village church and the Heimatmuseum Zehlendorf; around it the village became a suburb, the suburb became part of Greater Berlin, and after 1945 it ended up in the American sector of a divided city. Berlin made the oak Naturdenkmal 6-31/B in 1993. Traffic has been the hard part. In June 2020 a heavy limb broke off and came down in the middle of the rush hour. The response was to give the roots more room: the sealed ground around the trunk was to be opened up, and the bench that used to circle it was taken away. So do not expect to sit under it any more. Stand at the corner of Potsdamer Strasse and Berliner Strasse instead, and read the plaque.