The Honey Locust of Plagwitz Town Hall

Outside the old town hall of Plagwitz, Leipzig protects a tree from the other side of the Atlantic: a honey locust, a North American species that arms its trunk with branched thorns. It is not a giant. The city's register gives it 13 metres, well under half the height of the tallest tree on the same list. It is natural monument number 66, protected under council resolution 601/96. What it has instead is an address. The former Rathaus Plagwitz is a relic of the years when Plagwitz was a town of its own, the industrial suburb that grew up along the canals west of Leipzig before the city absorbed it. The tree stands on Alte Strasse beside that building, on the pavement side as far as the register's description goes. Nobody has recorded when it was planted, so whether it saw the council of an independent Plagwitz come and go is anybody's guess, and we will not pretend otherwise. No girth has been published either. If you know its story, tell us. The leaves are the thing to look at up close: fine and feathery, split into dozens of small leaflets, so the crown throws a light, broken shade rather than the solid shadow of a lime. It was photographed in 2022 and logged again at the spot in April 2024. It also makes an easy start to a short walk. The copper beech and the Japanese pagoda tree on Karl-Heine-Strasse are about 250 metres away.