What is the oldest tree in Dresden?
The Splittereiche, a pedunculate oak on the open lawn of Dresden's Grosser Garten, is the oldest of the four trees on this page, assessed at roughly 250 to 300 years old. It carries a visible scar from the nights of 13 and 14 February 1945, when bomb splinters tore open one side of its trunk along some eight metres of height. It survived, and the wound is still there, which is how it came to be called the splinter oak. A memorial plaque went up beside it in 2017, on the anniversary of the war's end in Europe, quoting Mark Twain on time and healing, and the city fitted protective metal sheeting over the damaged flank in 2018 after visitors kept picking at the old injury. It is not on Dresden's individual register of natural monuments, protected instead as part of the historic park around it, so if you know of a formal designation for it specifically, tell us.
Dresden keeps an official register of natural monuments, Naturdenkmale, reproduced as a public Wikipedia table alongside dedicated articles for several individual trees and cross-checked here against Stadtwiki Dresden, an independent community wiki that lists the same trees by their own register numbers. Three of the four trees on this page carry that formal designation; the Splittereiche does not, protected instead as part of the listed historic Grosser Garten around it rather than as an individual entry, and this page says so rather than implying an equivalent status. Two of the three registered trees, the Albertplatz plane and the Fetscherplatz oak, were designated by the same city council resolution of 3 January 1985. The fourth, the Trinitatisplatz oak, is the newest: protected only in February 2024, some 130 years after it was planted. Ages here are mostly derived from a planting date recorded at designation, which is more reliable than a growth-rate guess but still an estimate rather than a ring count, and one measurement, the Trinitatisplatz oak's girth, disagrees by a few centimetres between the register and a dedicated article; both figures are noted rather than silently resolved.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.