The Starkenstraße Giant Sequoia

A boy named Klaus Doelle used to press small treasures into the soft bark of this sequoia and seal them back up, sure nobody would ever find them. Decades later, grown up, he still lives across the street, and it was his father who got the tree protected in 1979. The Starkenstrasse Giant Sequoia went in during Freiburg's Gruenderzeit, the building boom of the late 1800s, when a handful of exotic sequoias reached the city as a fashion tree for new villa gardens. Only a few of that generation still stand on public ground; this one and its sisters on Karlstrasse and Waldhofstrasse are what is left. At roughly 30 metres tall and just under seven metres round, it now fills a quiet side street off Starkenstrasse with a red-brown, fire-resistant bark soft enough to sink a small metal box into without hurting the tree, which is exactly what Doelle did as a boy. The city has since removed the parking that once pressed against its base and installed bollards to keep vehicles off the roots. It stands on open pavement, free to walk past any time. Nobody has measured its exact age. The estimate, roughly 130 to 150 years, comes from the Gruenderzeit planting window the newspaper account places it in, not from a ring count.