The Last Oak of Hueblerstrasse

Until June 2025 there were two of them. These pedunculate oaks stood a few metres apart on the verge of Hüblerstrasse for something like 375 years, until fungi, viruses and bacteria left one unstable and it was felled on 22 June. This is the survivor, which the local press called its healthy brother. The stump of the twin stands beside it, and the city planned to plant a young oak of a more climate-tolerant kind in its place. The age comes from a resistograph test in 1995 that suggested the pair already stood by 1650, so read it as somewhere between 350 and 400 years rather than a birth certificate. Either way they are older than the villa quarter around them. Around 1866 this was still open ground and the road was the old route from Striesen through Blasewitz to Loschwitz; the shape of the crowns suggests the oaks once stood free, perhaps kept for their acorns to fatten pigs. The house at number 23 was destroyed in the Second World War. The oaks came through. Until 1998 they stood with half their trunks in the roadway. That year protective barriers went in, root bridges were laid at the neighbouring driveways, and the soil was replaced to 60 centimetres with a suction vehicle, which uncovered an old granite road half a metre down. Before the felling they were about 23 metres tall, with trunks of 4.65 and 4.80 metres; nobody recorded which girth belongs to the survivor.