The Founders' Plane of Kontumazgarten

Six individually protected trees stand on 1.7 hectares here, which is a great deal of legal attention for one small park. Kontumazgarten is a lawn, a playground and some old trees, and the city's 2020 natural monument ordinance lists ND-6 through ND-11 inside it: a chestnut, two beeches and three planes, each with its own number and its own protection. This is the first of the planes, ND-7. A Naturdenkmal is not a plaque. It is a legal designation under German conservation law that attaches to a single named object rather than to an area, and it makes cutting, damaging or altering the tree an offence, which is why a municipal park gets redesigned around a tree rather than through it. The ordinance is also the only source. It gives the species and the position and stops: no age, no girth, no description, and no article or survey names this plane on its own. So what is documented is the city's own judgement, repeated six times over in one small green, that this particular set of trees was worth writing into law. The six sit within about a hundred and fifty metres of each other, which makes the park a single stop rather than six errands. Free, open, with a playground, about fifteen minutes from the old town.