What is the oldest tree in Frankfurt?
Frankfurt's oldest documented tree is the Eschersheimer Linde on Eschersheimer Landstrasse, a large-leaved lime dated to the end of the 17th century and protected as a Naturdenkmal since 1937. It stands beside the U-Bahn station named after it, Lindenbaum, on a stretch where the line curves slightly rather than run under its roots.
Frankfurt dates its protected trees through a municipal register rather than through folklore, which makes the answer unusually checkable and unusually modest. The Eschersheimer Linde is the only tree on this list from before the 19th century. Everything else with a date is a park planting: a copper beech set in 1815, a weeping beech in 1845, a plane at the Nebbiensches Gartenhaus around 1820, and a dawn redwood from about 1950, which is as old as any dawn redwood in Europe can be, because the species was known only from fossils until living trees were found in China in 1943. The lime's trunk measures five metres around. Its age is given as the end of the 17th century rather than as a year, which is the honest form for a tree nobody cored. One tree here has no age at all: the eight-stemmed lime in Gruneburgpark, a bundle planting whose date no source we found records. If you know it, tell us.
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