The thickest oak in Hessen stands in the middle of a village that has been gone since 1312. The Hammundeseiche is 8.65 metres round and 25 metres tall, alone in a clearing in the Seulingswald with a rebuilt village well and a small pond beside it. The settlement was deserted three centuries before this acorn landed, which is why the tree grew wide and freestanding instead of drawn up thin in a wood. Free, open forest, about 600 metres on foot from the Nadelohr crossing.
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Foto: Alexander Nowak, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 (CC BY 3.0)
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The Hammundeseiche
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 350 to 440 years · Seulingswald, the deserted village of Hammundeseiche
The thickest oak in Hessen stands in the middle of a village that has been gone since 1312. Hammundeseiche was a real place, a settlement with a church, first recorded in 1141 and abandoned within two centuries; excavations in 1969 turned up the church foundations, an altar block and graves. What is left above ground is a clearing in the Seulingswald, a reconstructed village well, a small pond, and this oak.
It measures 8.65 metres round at chest height and 8.77 metres a metre up, which makes it the thickest oak in the state and one of the thickest single-stemmed oaks in Germany. It stands 25 metres tall under a crown 20 metres across, on a clear trunk that runs branch-free for a good height and is pocked with holes where limbs tore out.
The dates are worth doing. Recent literature puts the tree at 350 to 440 years, so the village had already been deserted for three centuries before this acorn landed. It grew up alone in the space a settlement left behind, which is why it is freestanding and vast rather than drawn up thin in a wood. Until about 1905 people called it the oak at the Nadelohr. The name it carries now is the village's.
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