The Pine of the Dresdner Heide

This pine has watched the forest around it be felled and grown back twice. Foresters count in rotations, the 80 to 140 years between planting a stand and cutting it, and this tree, which the city's documentation estimates at about 250 years old, has outlasted two of them. It was left standing each time, and now rises to about 25 metres over the open high forest of the Dresdner Heide. It is not a giant. Its trunk is 2.75 metres round and its crown about 12 metres across. What makes it rare is age in a working forest, where pines are grown to be harvested; the estimate puts its start somewhere in the middle or later part of the 18th century. In the 1970s volunteer naturalists proposed naming it the Karl-Jahn-Kiefer, after the forester who ran the Dresdner Heide forestry office from 1958 to 1975 and pushed for the landscape protection area of 1969. The name never caught on, though a sign bearing it has been photographed on the tree. Dresden made it a natural monument in January 1985, and its protection zone covers the whole crown and at least 18 metres around the trunk. It stands about 60 metres east of the Weissiger Weg, between the Ochsensteig and the Bischofsweg, with a plaque on its trunk. The most recent dated photographs we know of are from June 2017. If you walk out to it, tell us it is still there.