The Hackberries of Oskar-von-Miller-Ring

Eight Mediterranean trees grow on a green strip beside one of Munich's busiest ring roads, in a city more than 500 kilometres north of where the species grows wild. Celtis australis, native across southern Europe and North Africa, is registered by Munich as an extremely rare species within the city area, and this group of eight, standing on a green strip on Oskar-von-Miller-Ring west of the Siemens corporate headquarters, is protected as a natural monument specifically for that rarity rather than for any individual tree's size or age. No source gives the group a planting date, though a stand of eight mature specimens growing together suggests a single deliberate planting rather than volunteers that seeded themselves over time, most likely as an ornamental choice for the street rather than a remnant of anything older. Traffic on the ring road runs past them constantly, an odd setting for what the city's own records treat as a genuine botanical rarity worth the same legal protection as its oldest oaks and lindens.