The Albert Oak of Kauscha

In 1945 a laundry owner named Menzel plastered over the gold lettering on the stone in front of this oak, to hide a king's name from the approaching Soviet army. The king was Albert of Saxony. The oak had gone in as a young tree in spring 1898, on the village square of Kauscha, for his 70th birthday and his 25th year on the throne. Several Albert oaks were planted around Dresden for that double jubilee, at Waldschlösschen, Loschwitz, Stetzsch, Strehlen and Weissig. This is the largest known of them. It is also the one that outgrew its age. Its trunk measured 5.10 metres round in 2008, under a crown about 35 metres across and 25 metres high. In 2004 the Sächsische Zeitung called it Dresden's mightiest tree. Yet it has no old-age bark, the city's official gazette noted the same year, unlike the 17th-century oaks of the Hüblerstrasse and the Sauerbusch: a big tree, not an old one. In the 1950s children scraped the plaster off the stone. By 1999 little of the lettering was legible, and the stone has since been reconstructed. The oak had its own trouble: after the 1990s switch to natural gas, a leaking pipe through its root zone drove the oxygen out of the soil and thinned the crown. The pipe was replaced in 1998, and once Kauscha joined Dresden in 1999 the city rebuilt the site and the tree recovered markedly. The street through the village core is now called Zur Eiche.