What is the oldest tree in Leipzig?
The oldest tree in Leipzig with a published age is the Menzellinde in Schoenefeld, a small-leaved lime estimated at 200 to 300 years; the trunk is hollow, so it cannot be dated more closely. The painter Adolf von Menzel drew it on visits to the philosopher Moritz Lazarus's summer house. Most of Leipzig's other natural monuments carry no age at all, only the resolution that protected them: a bald cypress, a Japanese pagoda tree, a female ginkgo, a European white elm and a copper beech in two former villa gardens on Karl-Heine-Strasse in Plagwitz, and across the city a series of oaks, a plane on Leibnizstrasse and a Lebanon oak in Schoenau.
Saxony's nature protection law lets a municipality declare an individual tree a Naturdenkmal, its strongest legal protection, without requiring a documented age. Leipzig's own list gives each tree a designation number, a plot reference, the resolution that protects it and the protected zone around the trunk, which is often the only measure of size on record: 33 metres across for the oak on Dufourstrasse, 14 for the medlar-leaved oak on the Martin-Luther-Ring. The resolution year is a floor on how long each tree has stood, not a planting date. Only the Menzellinde has a published age and girth, 3.50 metres round. Every tree on this page rests on the city's list and photographs of it standing, and is flagged where that is all there is. Access varies by tree: most stand on the pavement or public ground, the elm and cypress grow in a villa garden now run as a public gallery, and four of the Plagwitz-area trees are seen from the street over villa walls.
One of Leipzig's trees also appears in Autumn Worth the Trip.