The Oak of the Dörfchen, Nymphenburg

This oak grows in the one part of a royal palace garden built to look like it wasn't designed at all. The Dörfchen, or little village, is a cluster of rustic farm-style buildings inside Nymphenburg Palace Park, built from 1803 as a picturesque contrast to the palace's formal Baroque and later English-landscape grounds surrounding it, complete with a working dairy and a chapel meant to evoke ordinary rural life for an audience that never had to live it. The oak stands near the Brunnhaus, on the way toward the Badenburg pavilion and the park's Großer See lake, and Munich's own natural monument register singles it out as unique in size within the city, a claim about scale rather than age, since no source gives the tree a documented planting date or precise age. What is certain is that it has grown large enough, inside grounds that have been continuously maintained by the Bavarian royal family and its successors since the 17th century, to earn individual legal protection in a park already full of centuries-old formal avenues.