The Burl Oak of the Little Dutzendteich

Measure this oak at chest height and you get just over six metres. Measure it above the burl and you get under five. A large burl covers one side of the trunk up to about 1.5 metres, and it is the burl that carries the oak to 6.05 metres round, the figure Rainer Lippert recorded in 2021 for his survey of Germany's monumental oaks. It stands on the south bank of the Kleiner Dutzendteich, with the Alfred-Hensel-Weg passing beside it and a view across the water to the Kongresshalle, the vast unfinished congress hall of the Nazi party rally grounds. Lippert estimates the oak at roughly 200 years, a reckoning rather than a count, so read it as 150 to 250. On any figure in that band the tree was already grown when building on the hall began in the 1930s. It is the taller of two burled oaks on this path. The Globe Oak, about 285 metres west, has the bigger burl and the thicker measurement, but this one reaches about 22 metres, with a crown some 18 metres across. Several lower branches are gone; the crown is otherwise whole, and Lippert judged its vitality good. The city protects the row of oaks along this shore as a natural monument. It has not published which trunks the row includes, so all we can say is that this oak stands in that row, not that it is one of the protected trees.