The Globe Oak of the Little Dutzendteich (Globuseiche)

Much of what makes this oak 6.56 metres round is not trunk at all. A burl shaped like a globe wraps about three fifths of it, rises up to 1.5 metres and reaches the ground on the slope side. Rainer Lippert, who measures Germany's monumental oaks, says that without it the tree would be too thin for his list. With it, the oak measured 6.50 metres at chest height in 2021, and 6.56 metres when the Ostdeutsches Baumarchiv came back in 2023. That archive has visited five times since 2004, and its notes record the change. The burl was fully barked until 2009; now it has large bare patches. The crown has been cut hard, every main limb shortened, leaving a tree about 15 metres tall. Both visitors still call it vital. Lippert puts its age at roughly 200 years, his estimate rather than a count, so read it as somewhere between 150 and 250. On any figure in that band it was already standing on the south shore of the Kleiner Dutzendteich when the Nazi party rally grounds were laid out around these ponds in the 1930s. The city protects the row of oaks along this shore, parallel to the Alfred-Hensel-Weg, as a natural monument. Whether this oak is one of the row's trees is unclear: the Baumarchiv records it as not protected, and the city has not published which trunks the row includes. Another burled oak stands about 300 metres east along the same path.