Hallstatt is famous for one view: the lakefront houses stacked below the mountain, the picture on every postcard. What the postcard leaves out are the five protected trees standing in and around it: four yews, three of them so plain the state's own register is the only account of them, plus a copper beech on a hilltop above Gosau protected for the near-perfect dome of its crown. One yew stands at the boat landing itself, in the foreground of the view, defining it by law.
0 / 5 visités à Hallstatt
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The Hallstatt Boat Landing Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Hallstatt village centre, lakeshore
Upper Austria's natural monument register says, in its own words, that this yew is part of why Hallstatt looks like Hallstatt. Prägend für das Landschaftsbild: defining for the landscape. Government files do not usually write like that.
It stands at the boat landing, about 25 metres northeast of the parish church, in the foreground of the view the whole village is famous for. The ferry from the railway station on the far shore ties up beside it, so for anyone arriving by train and boat, which is how most people arrive, this is the first tree in Hallstatt they meet. Almost all of them are looking up at the mountain instead.
The state protected it on 4 March 1991 and wrote down the two numbers it had: more than 2.6 metres round, about 15 metres tall. It recorded no age, and nobody since has put a number on it. Yews are the slowest growing and longest lived trees in Europe, which makes girth a poor clock. If you know when this one went in, tell us.
Everything on paper about it traces back to that one designation; no independent account of the tree has turned up. What is not in doubt is where it stands. On the waterline of a village that has been mining salt since prehistory, in front of the church, waiting for the next boat.
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2
The Obertraun Dorfeibe
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · roughly 200 years · Obertraun village centre
Austria protects trees for their rarity, their science or their size. This one it protected for belonging to the village. The natural monument file calls the Obertraun yew a Dorfdenkmal, a village monument, which is a sentimental word for a state database and about as close as officialdom gets to saying everybody here knows this tree.
It stands on the Hauptstraße, immediately before the turn-off to the Gemeindeamt, so anybody in Obertraun with business at the town hall walks past it. When the province put it under protection on 18 December 1980, it measured 136 centimetres round and about ten metres tall, and the file put its age at roughly 200 years. That was 46 years ago, which is the only arithmetic the evidence allows: somewhat past two centuries now, and no tidier number than that.
A yew of this size is not spectacular from a distance. The point of this one is its address. It was already standing when the Salzkammergut railway was cut through the valley below the Dachstein, it watched the ice caves above the village turn Obertraun into somewhere people get off the train, and it has been present for every municipal decision taken thirty metres away.
The register is the only source that describes it. Nobody else has written it up.
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3
The Untersee Meadow Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Untersee (a lakeshore hamlet of Bad Goisern, between Hallstatt and Bad Goisern)
A yew standing alone in an open meadow is an odd sight. They are woodland trees and churchyard trees, usually in company and usually in shade. This one stands free on a hillside above the Hallstättersee, and Upper Austria protected it on 22 July 1960, the oldest protection order of the yews on this page.
The province measured it then at 2.1 metres round. That figure is now 66 years old and it is the only measurement anyone recorded: no age, no height, nothing else. Yews grow slowly enough that a girth like that could mean several quite different centuries, so the honest answer is that nobody has dated this tree. If you have put a tape around it lately, we would like the number.
The paperwork cannot even agree on which hamlet it belongs to. The register's own location line puts it near the house at Untersee Nr. 40, standing free on the slope, while the list that reproduces the register files it under Obersee. The two are neighbouring lakeshore settlements of Bad Goisern, minutes apart, and we have followed the more specific of the two.
It is easier to reach than to place on paper. Get off at the Obersee halt, walk the shore, look up the slope. The meadow is open ground rather than a fenced garden, though where exactly the field edge runs is worth watching as you go.
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4
The Bad Goisern Parish Church Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · roughly 200 years · Bad Goisern village centre
You pass under this one on your way into the church. The yew stands on the street at the entrance to the Bad Goisern parish church, on the public side of the threshold rather than in among the graves, which is where yews in this part of Europe usually end up.
Upper Austria protected it on 4 August 2006 and, unusually for this register, was willing to put an age on it: roughly 200 years, estimated rather than counted, and worth keeping exactly as loose as the state left it. Nobody has cored this tree. The two figures that are measurements rather than guesses are a trunk 2.25 metres round in 2006 and a height of about 15 metres, which for a yew is tall; they are slow, dense, low things by habit, and this one has gone up.
Two centuries, give or take, puts its early years in a valley that ran on salt and timber. It was full grown by the time the Salzkammergut railway came through and turned Goisern from a working village into somewhere people get off the train, and it has stood at that doorway through every wedding and funeral since.
One thing to keep straight: Bad Goisern holds a second protected yew, three kilometres away in the hamlet of Untersee, standing alone in a meadow. This is not that tree.
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Photo : Christian Pirkl (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
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The Gosau Forestry Hill Beech
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · Gosau (a Dachstein valley village between Bad Goisern and Gosausee, reached by road rather than by the lakeshore railway)
Most of Hallstatt's protected trees earned that status through age or size, numbers the state could put in a file. This one earned it through shape. When Upper Austria placed the Gosau beech on the natural monument register on 18 December 1980, the reason it gave was neither: die auffallend kugelige Form der Krone, the pronouncedly spherical form of the crown. A beech that grew, by chance rather than by pruning, into something close to a perfect dome.
It stands alone on open hillside grass about 80 metres northwest of the Gosau forestry administration building, the kind of unobstructed spot that let whoever assessed it in 1980 take in the whole silhouette at once instead of guessing at it through neighbouring branches. No survey since has recorded a girth or an age, so neither figure appears on this page. A photograph taken on the same hillside in 2015 still shows the shape the register described, the crown reading close to round as a tree's outline gets.
Gosau sits partway up the Dachstein valley, on the road between Bad Goisern and the glacier lake at its head, which makes this a stop on the way through rather than a destination of its own. The forestry building gives the walk a fixed point to aim for. The tree is the shape on the hill above it.
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