The Bear Oak (Bäreneiche), Platnersberg

Around 1960 somebody filled the base of this oak's trunk with brickwork, and the tree has been slowly growing over the masonry ever since. The Bear Oak, the Bäreneiche, is the thickest of six old oaks lining a path on the Platnersberg in Erlenstegen: 6.77 metres round at chest height when it was measured for a survey of Germany's monumental oaks in 2014, and about 28 metres tall. In 1934 the same trunk measured 5.35 metres. The row once led to the summer house of Georg Thummen, who bought this land in 1533. The path was later moved to spare the oaks. The tree itself came later than Thummen: an estimate made in 2016 put it at about 300 years, and a city tree official told the Nordbayern paper it is almost as old as the old lime on the Hallerwiese. Read that as 300 to 350 years, a reckoning rather than a count. It takes its name from the Bärenbrunnen, a fountain going back to 1500 that stands a few paces south and still has a festival every year. The oak keeps company of its own: a 2004 survey found two summer roosts of Daubenton's bats inside it. It is not untroubled. A sulphur polypore, a wood-rotting fungus, has lived in it for some years, though the man who measured it still called its vitality fine. Nuremberg has protected it as a natural monument since 1986.