The Birch-in-Oak of Jenischpark

A birch is growing inside this oak, and has been for decades. The oak's trunk is open along one side, a birch of roughly a hundred years took root in the gap, and neither has given way since; the two crowns have grown together overhead, so from underneath it reads as one canopy with two kinds of leaf in it. The oak is the older half by two centuries, put at roughly 300 to 350 years by both sources that record it, and 6.74 metres round when it was measured in 2017. It leans badly enough to need a metal frame holding it up. That the two independent registers agree on the age and on the arrangement is worth noting, because a tree whose main feature is a curiosity rather than a measurement usually collects contradictions instead. It stands in the southeast corner of Jenischpark, close to the Elbchaussee and about 500 metres from the hollow oak that is the thickest in the city. The park was laid out above the Elbe in the early 1800s as an English landscape garden, all sweeping lawns and arranged views. This is the arrangement nobody planned. Free, open, no gate, and the walk between the two oaks takes about ten minutes.