The Meschwitz Oak of St. Pauli Cemetery

Germany's largest known shingle oak began as a father's grief, and for fifty years nobody remembered whose. In autumn 1880 Friedrich Wilhelm Meschwitz, Dresden's forest master and the man who opened the Dresdner Heide to walkers, buried his son Wilhelm here. Wilhelm was 19, the only one of three sons who could have followed his father into the forest. Meschwitz brought a young North American oak from the forest botanical garden at Tharandt and planted it beside the family grave. In 1888 he was laid there himself. In 1960 the grave was cleared. The oak stayed, and its story left with the headstone. It was simply a big tree in section B of St. Pauli Cemetery until 2010, when Rudolf Schroeder of the Saxon Heimatschutz association rediscovered it and the city entered it in its tree register as probably the finest shingle oak in Saxony. The German Dendrological Society has listed it as a record tree since 2012. A plaque went up on 18 October 2013, on Juergen Lambrecht's initiative, and with it came the name: the Meschwitz Oak. In 2020 it measured 3.8 metres round and 28.5 metres tall, and the 2012 plaque figures gave its crown 33 metres across. Cables and safety pruning now keep that crown safe above the people walking beneath it. Our pin is approximate, because two published coordinates disagree by about 100 metres; the plaque is the surer guide.