Schlosseiche bei Eisolzried

On a December night in 2003 somebody poured petrol into this oak's hollow trunk and set it alight. The fire brigade got there in time. The tree is still standing, its hollow now closed off behind a grille. It has been hollow since at least 1900, when Friedrich Stuetzer photographed it for his book of German trees and called it the Wegweisereiche, the signpost oak, for the path crossing it marked. He measured eight metres around. In 2017 a surveyor taped it again and got 9.60 metres, which the Deutsche Baumarchiv counts among the ten thickest naturally grown single-stem oaks in Germany. That is 1.6 metres of new girth in 117 years, slow going for an oak this size. Its age nobody agrees on. The conservation authority says about 600 years, the forest scientist Hans Joachim Froehlich said 700, and the Deutsches Baumarchiv puts it anywhere between 350 and 700, arguing that the poor gravelly ground here justifies the higher end. What is not in doubt is that it outlived the building it is named for. Schloss Eisolzried, in whose park it once stood, was pulled down around 1800, and a land register of 1737 already noted a pleasant little oak wood here. Today it is 23 metres tall with a crown that was still densely leaved when it was last surveyed, standing in a meadow beside the road out of the village towards Lauterbach.