The Ash of Leinthalerstraße

Munich's ordinance gives three words for why this tree is protected: extrem ausladende Krone, an extremely wide-spreading crown. No size, no age, no history, nothing about the street. Just the shape, and it was enough. The shape is also evidence. Fraxinus excelsior grown in a wood goes up tall and narrow, drawn on by its neighbours, and it only spreads when there is nothing beside it to compete with. A crown wide enough to earn a protection order on its own is a crown that grew in the open, and Freimann was farmland and village until Munich absorbed it in 1931. An ash does not spread like that in a street. Ash is also the tree Europe is currently losing. A fungus from east Asia, harmless to the ashes it evolved alongside, reached Poland in the early 1990s and has been killing European ash ever since, blackening the leaves and thinning the crown from the top down. Some trees resist it and nobody yet knows how many, so a mature ash still carrying a full crown is not the ordinary sight it was thirty years ago. The ordinance carries no dates and no measurements, and nothing else has recorded this tree, so its age is unknown. What is on the record is that in a list full of mighty and dominant trees, this one got in on width alone.