The Starkeiche of Rosental

The board beside this oak calls it Leipzig's oldest tree, and the age that travels with it is 600 years. The two surveys that put a tape round it think that is far too high. Rainer Lippert, who records Germany's monumental oaks, measured it in 2017: 6.65 metres round at chest height, 9.50 at the ground, about 27 metres tall, the trunk running without a branch for more than ten metres. He put it at about 350 years and wrote that the 600 in circulation seems far too high. The tree register baumkunde.de measured 6.69 metres in December 2021 and also says 350. So the age sits somewhere between 350 and 600 years, with the people holding tape measures at the lower end. Even that lower figure means it was already old when Napoleon's armies fought for the city in 1813. The trunk shows what it has been through. One side has an opening a metre wide that rises more than five metres, and behind it the tree is hollow and blackened with soot. Lightning marks and traces of fire are on record. At the last recorded visit, in March 2024, the register called it sick, with a small crown and perhaps retrenching, an old oak drawing its crown in. It stands in the floodplain forest of the Rosental, just off the path Zum Wackelturm, and in summer the woodland hides it well. Go when the leaves are down.