The Zerr-Eiche of Trinitatisplatz

Dresden got round to protecting this oak in February 2024, some 130 years after the city planted it. It was raised at the municipal nursery on the Tatzberg and set out on Trinitatisplatz in 1895, facing the main portal of the Trinitatiskirche. Fifty years later the air raids of February 1945 came over Johannstadt, and the oak came through them without serious damage. It then came through the winters that followed, when firewood was scarce enough in Dresden that standing trees disappeared into stoves, and this one was left alone. It is a Turkey oak, a southern European species with deeply cut leaves and acorns sitting in shaggy, mossy cups rather than the smooth ones a German oak wears. The case for designating it called it the strongest of its kind in Dresden and the third strongest in Saxony, on grounds of age, rarity, form and genetic value. The trunk measures about 3.84 metres round, worked from a recorded stem diameter of 122 centimetres, although the city's own register line says more than four metres. Nobody has reconciled the two figures and neither is worth much fuss. Twenty metres tall, standing in the open on a public square with a tram stop at its foot, it is about as easy to reach as a protected tree gets.