The Hungarian Oak of Erich-Zeigner-Allee

The tallest tree in Leipzig's register of natural monuments is not a native. It is a Hungarian oak, a species from south-east Europe, and the city lists it at 33 metres. No beech, plane or lime on that list is given a bigger figure. And it does not stand in a park or a villa garden. It stands at an ordinary street address on Erich-Zeigner-Allee in Plagwitz, the canal-cut district west of the centre that Leipzig built for its factories. The city protects it as natural monument number 59, under council resolution 601/96. Hungarian oaks are rare this far north, and the leaves give one away: big, and cut into many deep, regular lobes, nothing like the small rounded leaves of the oaks Saxony grew up with. It was photographed in August 2022, and an observation was logged at the spot in October 2025, so as far as anyone has recorded, it is still up there. What it has lived through, we cannot honestly tell you. Nobody has published its age or the size of its trunk. If you have stood beside it with a tape measure, or know when it was planted, tell us. One caution on the pin. It marks the register's point and has not been checked against aerial imagery. Whether the trunk stands on public ground or in a yard behind number 43a is not established either, so look from the street and stay out of private yards.