What is the oldest tree in Heidelberg?
The closest thing to a documented age among Heidelberg's designated trees belongs to the Molkenkur Linden, hollow inside and held together with cables, put at roughly 200 years by the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. It stands at the Molkenkur viewpoint above Heidelberg Castle. The other five trees on this page carry no recorded age at all, only the date they were designated a natural monument.
The 200-year figure for the Molkenkur Linden comes from a newspaper feature rather than a growth-rate reading or a ring count, and this page carries it as a loose middle point, 150 to 250 years, rather than a precise number. The trunk is genuinely hollow, and the crown has been held together with steel cables for twenty years, a maintenance choice the city has committed to rather than felling it. Nothing else here has comparable evidence. The Schlossberg Beech, the Neuenheimer Landstrasse Swamp Cypress, the Zwingerstrasse Horse Chestnuts, the Bergstrasse Crimean Linden and the Ringstrasse Oak are each documented only by a state register entry giving a name, a coordinate and a designation date between 1939 and 1986, with no age, girth or description attached to any. Five of the six pins here come from that register's own coordinate rather than a reading at the trunk, hence approximate: expect the right stretch of street or garden rather than the exact spot. Where a tree's age or position is unknown, this page states that rather than inventing a number, and asks a visitor who can measure or place it more precisely to tell us.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.