The Red Oak of Viertelsweg

The oak on this Gohlis street corner comes from North America, and in October it gives itself away. A northern red oak's leaves turn a rich red in autumn, where the native oaks of Saxony go yellow and brown. Leipzig protects it as natural monument number 63, under council resolution 601/96, on a patch of public green where Viertelsweg meets Heinrich-Budde-Strasse. The city's tree cadastre measures the trunk at 3.31 metres round and 1.05 metres through, under a crown 14 metres across. Its height depends on which record you read: 19 metres in the cadastre, 25 in the city's list of natural monuments. For a species planted far from home, that is a big tree. Nobody has published when it went in. The cadastre's planting year of 1886 is a figure it gives to a whole class of trees rather than a record of this one, which puts the oak at roughly 120 to 160 years and no closer. How an American oak came to be planted on this corner is not written down either. If you know, tell us. The leaves are worth a look in any month. They are bigger than a native oak's and cut into pointed lobes that end in fine bristles, where the oaks Saxony grew up with have rounded ones. The latest word on it is the city still listing it as standing, and nobody has posted a photograph of it lately. If you pass the corner, tell us how it looks.