The Service Tree of Riedberg

In 2020 two conservation groups, NABU and BUND, put up a stele for this tree's hundredth birthday. The volunteer register that reports the party also gives its planting year as 1896, which would have made it 124 on the day. Neither date comes with a paper trail we could read, so the honest age is somewhere between 100 and 130 years. The species is not in doubt. This is a Speierling, a service tree, one of Germany's rare native fruit trees, and it stands alone on a small meadow at the Niederurseler Hang. Frankfurt's 2025 list of natural monuments puts it first, as entry 001, for its rarity, its character and its beauty. It is still putting on wood. Volunteers measured the trunk at 2.71 metres round in 2015 and 2.89 metres in 2022, when they found it 15 metres tall and in vital health. In September and October it carries small fruit shaped like apples or pears, sweet only once they soften. One loose end. The description of a 2020 photograph on Wikimedia Commons says the tree was designated in January 2014 and no longer was by 2020. The city's 2025 list, the newer word, still carries it. The meadow is free and open, beside Graf-von-Stauffenberg-Allee on the western edge of Riedberg. The protected ground is the circle within 15 metres of the trunk.