The Pedunculate Oak of Dufourstrasse

Leipzig keeps a protected zone around every one of its natural monuments, and this oak's is 33 metres across, as wide as any on the city's list. That number is the register's way of saying how far the roots and crown are judged to reach, and here it means a canopy that fills the whole gap between two apartment blocks. The oak stands beside the Pleissemuehlgraben, one of the narrow mill canals that carried the river Pleisse's water through the city, with a public footpath and a railing along the bank. From the path you see it at its best: a broad, many-limbed pedunculate oak rising out of a channel lined with concrete and housing, the one thing in the view that is not a right angle. The city designated it Naturdenkmal number 46 in the late 1990s. Beyond that the record is thin. The register gives no height, no girth and no age, and nobody we know of has published a measurement. A tree this broad in a dense inner district is unlikely to be young, but unlikely is not a date, and this page will not pretend otherwise. So it is a question rather than a number. If you pass it with a tape measure, the trunk's circumference at chest height would tell us more than any guess. Send it to us and the page will carry it.