The Oak of Demmeringstrasse

Lindenau has two protected oaks within 150 metres of each other, and this is the one that hangs over a brick wall. Its crown spreads across Demmeringstrasse and above the parked cars, wide enough that in May, when the new leaves are still the acid green of spring, it is the brightest thing in the street. Leipzig listed it as Naturdenkmal number 7 under resolution 601/96, the same 1996 decision that protects the villa trees of Karl-Heine-Strasse. The register draws a protected zone 20 metres across around it. That is all the paperwork holds: no girth, no height, no age. The setting does the rest. This is a street of tenement blocks, parked cars and graffiti, and a single oak with a crown that size turns it, for one stretch, into something closer to a village lane. A pedunculate oak can live for many centuries; how much of that this one has used up is not recorded. It makes a short walk with its neighbour on Karl-Ferlemann-Strasse, round the corner to the north-west. A third protected tree, a wych elm at Demmeringstrasse 77, stands behind a fence close by and cannot be visited. Nobody has dated this oak. If you know when it went in, or have measured the trunk, tell us.