The Sedanquartier Weeping Beech

The State of Baden-Württemberg owned the plot, wanted to build on it, and lost to the tree. This weeping beech stands on the corner of Wilhelmstraße and Moltkestraße on state-owned land in the Sedanquartier, and in 2020 a member of the state parliament, Gabi Rolland, filed a formal question pressing for its protection. The government's answer acknowledged the tree's ecological value and noted, in the same breath, that the plot's development value was considerable too. The tree won. Freiburg designated it a natural monument on 29 October 2021, one of thirty announced together, which took the city's total to 130. A week later the neighbourhood's residents' group held a small ceremony at the trunk with the environment mayor present. Very few trees anywhere get a party. The press covering the row never called it anything more precise than a splendid deciduous tree and a giant, which is the useful part of the record and also its limit. Nobody has measured its girth or dated it, and no source names the cultivar; it is almost certainly the standard weeping form of the European beech, but that is a reasonable assumption rather than a documented one. If you can tell us how thick it is, we will put the number on this page. It shares its corner with a public sculpture, the Kaichina Doll by Peter Zimmermann, so the walk gives you two things to stand in front of.