Waldtraut vom Mühlwald

The tallest tree in Germany is not a German species and it is only 116 years old. Waldtraut vom Mühlwald is a coastal Douglas fir, planted in 1913 as a three-year-old sapling in a forestry trial that had been putting North American conifers into the Freiburg city forest since 1896. The age comes from a written planting date rather than a guess. The height, measured in April 2024, is 67.85 metres. It is still going up. Five years earlier it was measured at 67.10 metres, and the two sources that track it differ slightly on the current rate, somewhere between 15 and 30 centimetres a year. Both call it vigorous. The trunk is 3.38 metres round at chest height, which for that height is slender. Freiburg's own foresters gave it the name. The experiment it belongs to is still standing around it: several more Douglas firs of the same 1913 planting, none of which won the title. A century-old test of whether an American conifer would take in the hills above Freiburg, with the answer visible from a long way off. Be realistic about getting there. It is a signed forest walk of about 2.5 kilometres from the Kyburg stop in Günterstal, roughly 150 metres of climb, an hour or more each way. There is no viewing platform. There are wooden information boards at the foot of the tree, and a lot of looking straight up.