Four of Dresden's protected trees, all old enough to have stood through the bombing of February 1945. A splinter-scarred oak in the Grosser Garten wears its wound as a monument. A plane tree lives on an Albertplatz traffic island. An overcup oak on Fetscherplatz got its own curved, custom-built tram shelter in 1949 rather than being moved for one. A Turkey oak on Trinitatisplatz waited until 2024 for legal protection, a century after the city planted it. Three carry the same 1985 designation; one is the newest natural monument in the city.
0 of 4 visited in Dresden
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The Zerr-Eiche of Trinitatisplatz
Turkey Oak (Quercus cerris) · roughly 130 years · Johannstadt
Dresden got round to protecting this oak in February 2024, some 130 years after the city planted it. It was raised at the municipal nursery on the Tatzberg and set out on Trinitatisplatz in 1895, facing the main portal of the Trinitatiskirche. Fifty years later the air raids of February 1945 came over Johannstadt, and the oak came through them without serious damage. It then came through the winters that followed, when firewood was scarce enough in Dresden that standing trees disappeared into stoves, and this one was left alone.
It is a Turkey oak, a southern European species with deeply cut leaves and acorns sitting in shaggy, mossy cups rather than the smooth ones a German oak wears. The case for designating it called it the strongest of its kind in Dresden and the third strongest in Saxony, on grounds of age, rarity, form and genetic value.
The trunk measures about 3.84 metres round, worked from a recorded stem diameter of 122 centimetres, although the city's own register line says more than four metres. Nobody has reconciled the two figures and neither is worth much fuss.
Twenty metres tall, standing in the open on a public square with a tram stop at its foot, it is about as easy to reach as a protected tree gets.
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2
The Plane Tree of Albertplatz
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 140 years · Innere Neustadt
This plane tree lives on a traffic island. Albertplatz is one of the busiest interchanges in Dresden, a circle of tram and bus routes in the Neustadt, and the tree stands out in the middle of it toward Bautzner Strasse, twenty-five metres tall with a crown roughly as wide as it is high.
It was planted around 1885, when that ground was open and quiet. Everything else arrived later: the trams, the traffic, the night of 13 February 1945 and the long rebuilding after it, forty years of the GDR, and the Neustadt's more recent turn into the loudest quarter in the city. The tree has stayed put through all of it on its own island, which is the closest thing to a fixed point Albertplatz has. Dresden made it a natural monument on 3 January 1985, by the same council resolution that protected the oak on Fetscherplatz.
A London plane is a hybrid of the American and the Oriental plane, and it was planted across European cities for exactly the qualities on show here. It takes heat, compacted soil and dirty air better than almost anything else with a trunk, and it sheds its bark in pale plates through the summer instead of letting the grime build up.
Its trunk measures 3.30 metres round. Both the register and the city's own record agree on the figure, which is rarer than it sounds.
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3
The Oak of Fetscherplatz
Overcup Oak (Quercus lyrata) · roughly 125 years · Johannstadt
In 1949 an architect built a tram shelter around this tree rather than move either of them. Herbert Schneider put his waiting kiosk on Fetscherplatz so close to the trunk that the roof had to curve to make room for the oak, four years after the air raids, in a city with more urgent things to be careful about. The two have shared the corner ever since.
The tree is an overcup oak, a North American species and an unlikely thing to find holding down a square in Johannstadt. It went in around 1900, when the place was still called Fuerstenplatz, and it has since put out a crown about thirty-two metres across, wider than the tree is tall. That crown is effectively the roof of the square. Twenty-five metres up, 3.35 metres round at the trunk, and the only real shade anyone waiting for a tram is going to get.
Dresden protected it as a natural monument on 3 January 1985, in the same council resolution that covered the plane tree on Albertplatz.
If you are there in autumn, look at the acorns on the ground. The cup on this species swallows almost the entire nut, which is where the name comes from and the quickest way to tell it apart from every other oak in the city.
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4
The Splittereiche
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 250 to 300 years · Grosser Garten
This oak is named after its wounds. On the nights of 13 and 14 February 1945 the bombing of Dresden reached the Grosser Garten, and splinters tore open one side of the trunk along roughly eight metres of its height. The tree survived. The damage is still there and still obvious, which is how it came to be called the Splittereiche, the splinter oak.
It was already old when that happened. An assessment made in the 2010s put it at between 250 and 300 years, a range nobody has narrowed since and which is itself a decade out of date by now. It stands twenty-seven metres tall with a trunk over six metres round, out on open lawn a short walk south of the Mosaikbrunnen, so you see the whole shape of it from a distance before you get to the scar.
On 8 May 2017, the seventy-second anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, a memorial plaque went up beside it carrying a line from Mark Twain: time may heal all wounds, but it is a lousy cosmetician. The year after, the city fitted metal sheeting over the damaged flank, because visitors picking at the old injury were making it worse.
We have not found it listed individually in Dresden's register of natural monuments. It stands inside a protected historic park instead, and it is the tree people in that park come to find.
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