The Pagoda Tree of Karl-Heine-Strasse

Despite the name, the Japanese pagoda tree is native to China, not Japan; it reached Europe through Japanese trade ports in the eighteenth century and kept the misnomer. This one has grown large enough on a Plagwitz street to be protected as a Naturdenkmal, Saxony's strongest legal status for an individual tree. It flowers late for a tree of its size, creamy white clusters in August when most other street trees have finished for the year, which is usually the detail that gets a pagoda tree noticed at all outside of botanical collections. It stands a few doors from a protected copper beech, the last of five Naturdenkmal trees packed into roughly 150 metres of Karl-Heine-Strasse: a ginkgo, a European white elm and a bald cypress complete the run. In its native range the pagoda tree's unopened flower buds are harvested by the ton for rutin, a plant compound used in dyes and in vitamin supplements, a use this single street tree in Plagwitz will never see put to work.