The Reichs- und Friedenseiche

Twelve thousand schoolchildren planted this oak in one afternoon, or at least watched a handful of their classmates do it. On 1 July 1871, weeks after the peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War was signed in Frankfurt, Munich staged a peace festival at the Flaucher meadows along the Isar. A procession of children, city councillors and guests gathered while selected boys and girls set a young oak sapling into the ground. A plaque at the site still reads, in German, Reich and Peace Oak, planted by the youth of the city of Munich on 1 July 1871, making this one of the few trees on this list with an exact, undisputed planting date rather than an estimate. Similar Friedenseichen went into the ground across German cities that year, each one a small piece of civic theatre marking the unification of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I as much as the peace itself. This one has had a century and a half since to grow into an ordinary, unremarkable-looking oak in a riverside park, its real distinction lying entirely in the date rather than the trunk.