The Medlar-Leaved Oak of Martin-Luther-Ring

Number 1 on Leipzig's list of natural monuments is not a giant in a park. It is a street tree on the inner ring road, a few hundred metres from the Markt, with trams and traffic running past its roots. It is also stranger than it looks from the kerb. The register records it as Quercus petraea "Mespilifolia", a cultivar of the sessile oak whose leaves are long and narrow, shaped more like a medlar's than an oak's, with little or none of the lobing that makes an oak leaf an oak leaf. Seen from the pavement, the crown looks finer and lighter than an ordinary oak's. We have taken the cultivar from the register; nobody we know of has checked it leaf in hand, and if you do, tell us what you find. The road it stands on carries history of its own. Leipzig's Ring is the road the Monday demonstrators of autumn 1989 made famous, tens of thousands of people walking the circuit of the old town week after week. Nobody has dated this oak, so whether it was already standing that autumn is a question the record cannot answer. The city protects it with a zone 14 metres across, small beside the 33 metres of the Dufourstrasse oak, which is what a pavement leaves room for. Its girth and height are unrecorded. A tape measure would settle the first.