The Grenzeiche of the Green Valley

The sources disagree about when this oak was planted by two full centuries: somewhere between 1570 and 1770. What they agree on is where. It stands in the Grünes Tälchen, the little green valley of the Hammerbach, on the old boundary between Pesterwitz and Potschappel, and it may have been planted to mark that line. That is how it got its name, the Grenzeiche, the boundary oak. Whatever its age, it has the build of an old tree. When it was measured in February 2022 its trunk was 6.20 metres round, it stood about 29 metres tall and its crown spread more than 22 metres. The trunk is hollow. Somebody once tried to set fire to it, and it survived; on that same 2022 visit it was recorded as vital, with no fungi. So the age here is a band rather than a number, roughly 250 to 450 years depending on which local history you follow, and one tree register settles on the low end. If a dated document for the planting exists, we would like to see it. The oak is one of the natural monuments of the town of Freital, just west of Dresden, and the Plague Oak of Pesterwitz, planted in 1681, stands about a kilometre away. Here the setting is quieter: the bank of a stream, where the public path from Kohlsdorfer Strasse to Kohlsdorf crosses the water.