Every tree on this page stands outside Potsdam itself, across the Glienicke bridge in Berlin. All four are protected there by the Land of Berlin, a twelve-minute tram ride from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof: two small-leaved limes, one named the King's Linden in the register itself, and two oaks, the further nearly six metres round. The parkland they stand in is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site covering the palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin, open and free to walk year-round.
0 of 4 visited in Potsdam
1
The Linden of Park Jagdschloss Glienicke
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · Schlosspark Glienicke, Berlin side of the Glienicke Bridge
Two hundred metres from this lime tree is the bridge where the Cold War traded people. Glienicker Brücke carried the spy exchanges between the Americans and the Soviets, and the border ran down the middle of the water beneath it. The tree stands on the eastern bank, which is to say in Berlin, though it is a twelve-minute tram ride from Potsdam's main station and a long way from anything a Berliner thinks of as the city. It is a small-leaved lime, a Winter-Linde, protected by the Land of Berlin as a natural monument under the number 6-99/B, standing in the open parkland of Park Jagdschloss Glienicke around the old hunting lodge. What that protection does not come with is information. The register gives a species, a parcel number and a place, and records no age, no girth and no note on the tree's condition, because it is a legal instrument rather than a survey. So this entry is thinner than most here, and it says so. One official source names the tree and nothing else we could find does. What that source does establish is the thing worth walking for: somebody looked at this particular lime, among all the trees in a large park, and decided it was not to be cut down.
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2
The King's Linden
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · Schlosspark Glienicke, Berlin side of the Glienicke Bridge
People took tea under this lime, and the floor they did it on is still there. A mosaic pavement near the Lions Fountain in the Schlossgarten marks the spot where visitors to Prince Carl of Prussia's estate sat beneath the tree, and the park's own account calls it one of the most impressive solitary trees on the estate. Berlin's register of natural monuments agrees in its own dry way. It gives the tree a number, 6-100/B, and a name, Königslinde, the King's Linden, which is unusual in a document that mostly records species and parcel numbers and then stops. The garden around it was laid out from 1816 by Peter Joseph Lenné for Prince Carl, an English landscape of long sightlines on a Prussian riverbank, and it is now part of the UNESCO World Heritage site covering the palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin. It is open, free, and has no gate. Neither the register nor the park's history gives this lime an age or a girth, so it gets neither here. It stands on Königstraße opposite the Wiesenteich pond, on the Berlin side of the Glienicke bridge, twelve minutes from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof on the 93 tram, and it is the tree on this walk that people actually sat under.
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3
The Schlosspark Glienicke Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Schlosspark Glienicke, Berlin side of the Glienicke Bridge
Berlin protects this oak by law and almost nothing else about it is on record. It appears in the Land of Berlin's register of natural monuments as 6-105/B, a Stiel-Eiche, a Pedunculate Oak, standing about 150 metres north of Königstraße 35C in Schlosspark Glienicke. That entry gives a species, a parcel and a position, and there it ends: no age, no girth, no word on the tree's condition, because the register exists to say what may not be felled rather than to describe what is there. So this is a tree you go and read for yourself. It grows in the landscape garden Peter Joseph Lenné began laying out in 1816 for Prince Carl of Prussia, a park of engineered views designed to look accidental, now inside the UNESCO World Heritage site that covers the palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin. Oaks are the long-lived furniture of gardens like this one, and often older than the design around them. The one fact the register does carry says something a tape measure would not: out of the thousands of trees standing in this parkland, somebody walked up to this one and wrote it down. It is a few minutes further into the park than the two protected limes. If you get a tape round it, we would like the number.
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4
The Jägerhof Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 300 years · Volkspark Klein-Glienicke, Berlin side of the Glienicke Bridge
The oak was here first. The Jägerhof in Volkspark Klein-Glienicke went up some time before 1830, and by the reckoning of the German veteran-tree archive that measured this tree, it was already more than a hundred years old when the builders arrived. That puts its beginning before roughly 1730, which makes 300 years a fair estimate and not a precise one. Nobody has cored it, and Berlin's register of natural monuments, which protects it as 6-73/B, has no age field to put a figure in. The girth is firmer: 566 centimetres at chest height, taped in 2023. Nearly six metres of trunk, and by a wide margin the heaviest tree on this walk. It stands high above the Havel path near the Krughorn headland, south along the park from the Glienicke bridge and about fifteen to twenty minutes on foot from the other three trees here. Berlin bought the estate in the 1930s and opened it to the public, so the ground under this oak has been walkable for the better part of a century. Before that it was hunting country, which is what a Jägerhof is for. The lodge was built for the sport. The oak was simply standing in the way of it, and outlived the whole arrangement.
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