The Brentanopark Oak

This oak is getting thinner. Volunteer measurers found its waist at 6.97 metres in 2019 and 6.90 metres two years later, and the bark that has come away in large patches accounts for about eight centimetres of the loss. Even so, nearly seven metres round is a great deal of pedunculate oak. It has lost height too. The crown stood 28 metres until it was cut back a few years before 2021; it now measures 25 to 26 metres, with a spread of about 25. The first branches leave the trunk at two metres, and the stubs of others, sawn off long ago, have almost grown over. The measurers put it at about 300 years, an estimate from its size, so read that as somewhere between 250 and 350. The Brentanopark around it was laid out in 1770 and extended in 1823; nobody has recorded whether the oak was planted for the park or was already standing. The city has owned it since 1926 and rebuilt it for the public. Its health is the honest worry. In 2021 its vitality seemed to be declining, and the register visit of July 2026 recorded it as ill, with bark damage. It was alive and photographed that month. It stands in the middle of the park, free to visit, in Rödelheim. The S3, S4 and S5 stop at Frankfurt-Rödelheim, and the Petrihaus ginkgo is about 150 metres away, which makes the two a single stop.