What is the oldest tree in Boetersheim?
A large hollow oak beside the war memorial in Boetersheim, a tiny hamlet in Lower Saxony. Two independent tree registers put its girth at 7.1 to 7.3 metres and its age at roughly 600 to 800 years. It is the only tree mapped here, published alone under the single-tree exception.
Boetersheim's oak has taken more damage than most trees survive. An old local account times a lightning strike to around 1904, after which the tree reportedly smouldered inside for weeks. In 1959 the trunk burst open and a large branch broke away. What is left today is completely hollow, heavily fissured, and full of decayed wood, stabilised with steel cables and props near the top so the crown can keep standing over the cavity below. Both registers that have measured it, baumkunde.de and the local Alte Bäume der Heide project, agree the tree is still alive and holding on rather than declining sharply, based on their most recent surveys. Its girth is recorded at 7.1 to 7.3 metres and its height at 21 to 23 metres, with a crown spreading about 14 metres. The locally popular name, Tausendjährige Eiche, promises a thousand years; both registers that measured it call that a nickname rather than a dated fact, and put the real figure at roughly 600 to 800 years. It stands next to Boetersheim's war memorial, in a hamlet that also keeps an old watermill and smithy, reached by road rather than any station.
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