The Obertraun Dorfeibe

Austria protects trees for their rarity, their science or their size. This one it protected for belonging to the village. The natural monument file calls the Obertraun yew a Dorfdenkmal, a village monument, which is a sentimental word for a state database and about as close as officialdom gets to saying everybody here knows this tree. It stands on the Hauptstraße, immediately before the turn-off to the Gemeindeamt, so anybody in Obertraun with business at the town hall walks past it. When the province put it under protection on 18 December 1980, it measured 136 centimetres round and about ten metres tall, and the file put its age at roughly 200 years. That was 46 years ago, which is the only arithmetic the evidence allows: somewhat past two centuries now, and no tidier number than that. A yew of this size is not spectacular from a distance. The point of this one is its address. It was already standing when the Salzkammergut railway was cut through the valley below the Dachstein, it watched the ice caves above the village turn Obertraun into somewhere people get off the train, and it has been present for every municipal decision taken thirty metres away. The register is the only source that describes it. Nobody else has written it up.