Sixteen cedar seedlings came from Kew in 1818 and two are still standing in front of the palace, the larger of them the thickest of its kind in Germany. The Schlosspark is thirteen hectares of English landscape garden on ground that has been garden since 1441, and it holds five big trunks, four of them over five metres round within a few hundred metres of each other. Free to walk through, twenty-five minutes from Frankfurt.
0 / 5 Bad Homburgで訪れた数
写真：dontworry, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
1
The Cedars of the Konigsflugel
Cedar (Cedrus libani per baumkunde.de, Cedrus atlantica per the city of Bad Homburg; disputed, see notes) · planted 1822 · Schlosspark, beside the palace
Sixteen cedar seedlings came from Kew and two of them are still standing here. They arrived through Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain, who married Landgrave Friedrich VI Joseph in 1818, brought her own interest in botany with her and kept her English contacts. The pair went into the ground in front of the palace's royal wing in 1822 and have grown side by side ever since.
The larger one is the point. It is 6.40 metres round, 21 metres tall, and the city calls it both the thickest and the oldest of its kind in Germany. Its reach is the part that does not photograph: by 2011 the crown measured more than 35 metres from east to west, so the tree is far wider than it is high, with limbs that run out nearly horizontally and then turn up at the ends.
Two hundred years is young for a cedar. The species can pass 800, which means this one is barely a quarter through and still thickening. Sources disagree about which cedar it actually is: the city says Atlas cedar, the German tree register says cedar of Lebanon. If you know your cedars, we would like to hear which.
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2
The Dawn Redwood by the Pond
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) · about 70 years · Schlosspark, southern end
This species was known only from fossils until 1944. A Chinese forester found living dawn redwoods in Hubei, seed went round the world's botanic gardens from 1948, and almost every large specimen in Europe is one of that first generation. This one is about 70 years old, which for a tree on this site makes it among the youngest here and by some distance the fastest.
In seventy years it has put on 5.8 metres of girth and 28 metres of height, which is more than the cedar managed in two hundred. The base is the part worth walking to: it flares out into deep vertical folds and buttresses, gnarled in a way that reads as far older than the tree is, and the bark runs in long fibrous strips up a trunk that tapers hard.
It is a conifer that drops its needles, so it turns foxy orange in November and stands bare through winter. Come in autumn and it is the brightest thing at the south end of the park.
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3
The Oak at the Bridge
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Schlosspark, north end of the pond
Nobody has dated this oak, and it is probably the oldest thing in the park. It is 5.39 metres round and 25 metres tall, measured in the autumn of 2021 by the dendrologist who catalogued this park's big trees, and that girth puts it well past the cedars that have a planting date on them.
It stands just left of the bridge at the north end of the pond, on ground that has been garden since at least 1441, when a garden is first recorded beside the castle here. The park was laid out as a baroque garden from 1680 under Landgrave Friedrich II and remade as an English landscape park from the later eighteenth century, which is the style it still wears: grass, water, and single large trees given room. An oak this wide was either kept through one of those remakings or planted at one of them.
We would like to know which, and so would anyone standing under it. If you have a source for its age, a plaque, a park survey, a local record, tell us and we will put it on the page.
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4
The Oak by the Lake
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Schlosspark, by the lake
There are two oaks of this size in the park and nobody has written down which is which. This one is 4.94 metres round, measured in August 2021, and stands at the lake in the southern half of the grounds; the other is 5.39 metres and stands at the bridge two hundred metres north. Both are large enough that a visitor would stop, and neither carries a plaque.
That is not a footnote here. A reader sent us the Schlosspark oak with a girth of about five metres, which sits between the two, so the tip could have been either. Rather than pick one and be quietly wrong, both are on the map, and whichever you are standing under, the other is a short walk away.
It is a pedunculate oak, the common oak of German parkland, and at this girth it is almost certainly older than the cedars by the palace that have a planting year attached to them. Nobody has dated it. In a park laid out as a baroque garden from 1680 and remade as an English landscape park a century later, a trunk this wide was either kept through one of those remakings or planted at one of them, and no source says which.
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5
The Plane by the Wingnuts
Plane (Platanus sp.) · Schlosspark, north end of the pond
At 5.66 metres round, this is the thickest trunk anyone has measured in the park, wider than the famous cedars and wider than the big oak thirty metres away. It has no name, no plaque and no entry in any register. It turned up in a dendrologist's survey of the park in 2021 and that is the whole of its paper trail.
It stands about ten metres east of the second of the park's wingnuts, near the north end of the pond. Planes are easy to pick out once the eye knows them: bark that flakes off in irregular plates and leaves the trunk patched in olive, cream and grey, a pattern that keeps changing as the tree sheds, and seed balls that hang on bare branches through the winter like small brown lanterns.
We have not established which plane it is. The London plane is the usual one in a park of this date, but nobody has said so in print about this tree, so we have not written it down as fact. If you can tell an oriental plane from a London plane by the leaf lobes or the seed balls, stand under it and tell us.
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