What is the oldest tree in Freiburg?
Freiburg's most notable tree by measurement is Waldtraut vom Mühlwald, a coastal Douglas fir in the Günterstäler Stadtwald, Germany's tallest tree at 67.85 metres as of an April 2024 survey. It is also the one tree here with a documented age, planted in 1913, about 116 years old. The other three trees on this page carry no recorded age at all, so none can honestly be called older or younger than it.
Waldtraut's height is well documented (67.85 metres in April 2024, up from 67.10 in an earlier measurement) and its age is a written planting date rather than a guess: a three-year sapling put in during a 1913 forestry trial that had been testing North American conifers in the Freiburg city forest since 1896. That makes it, at around 116 years, almost certainly the youngest of the four trees on this page by trunk, not the oldest. The Sedanquartier Weeping Beech, the Bernhardstraße Ginkgo and the Alexandereiche all carry no age or girth in any source found, and this page says so plainly rather than guessing. The Alexandereiche has the oldest designation date, 1974, which speaks to how long it has been protected rather than how old the tree itself is. Reaching Waldtraut means a signed 2.5 km forest walk from the Kyburg tram stop in Günterstal, about 150 metres of climbing, an hour or more each way with no viewing platform, just wooden information boards at the foot of the tree. The other three stand on ordinary Freiburg streets and squares, reachable on foot or by tram in minutes.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.