The Japanese Pagoda Tree of Flossplatz

Nobody knows when this pagoda tree was planted, but the two best guesses land seven years apart. The tree survey site baumkunde.de, measuring it in March 2022, thought it possibly went in around 1873. Leipzig's tree cadastre files 1866, a year it gives to a whole class of old trees rather than a record of this one. Neither is a document, so the honest age is a range: somewhere between 120 and 200 years. The measurements are firmer. The cadastre gives the trunk 3.55 metres round and the crown 20 metres across, on a height of 25 metres. The 2022 survey found 3.52 metres and 25, while the city's list of natural monuments says 23. Leipzig protects it as natural monument number 100, under council resolution 1036/97. It stands on the Flossplatz, a small public square south of the old town, at the corner of Riemannstrasse. The survey called it a Baumveteran and found it vital, with old wounds long since callused over and several supports fitted in the crown to hold it together. What it saw of the city's twentieth century, nobody has written down. Despite the name, the species comes from China. Time a visit for August if you can: that is when it flowers, in loose sprays of cream, at a point in the summer when almost nothing else is in bloom.