Potsdam protects this oak for three reasons at once: its beauty, its place in local history, and its scientific value. It stands in an ordinary city street, between house numbers 1 and 3 on Babelsberger Strasse. The city lists it as natural monument number 36, a pedunculate oak with a trunk 3.67 metres round. That is a serious waistline for a street tree, and it is the one hard measurement anyone has published. The register names local history as a reason without saying which history it means, and we have found no source that does, so we will not guess at it. The same goes for its age: no source gives one, and a girth alone is not enough for us to put a number on it. If you know the story of this oak, or roughly when it went in, tell us. It would be the first time either was written down. What we can vouch for is the spot. The city's register and the mapped tree agree to within about eleven metres, a photograph of it as a natural monument sits in the public Wikimedia Commons archive, and an iNaturalist sighting was logged here in 2023. It is a street tree, free to see from the pavement at any hour, and about fifteen minutes on foot from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof.
In fruit
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Babelsberger Strasse, between nos. 1 and 3, 14473 PotsdamYou can recognise it by its trunk, 3.67 metres round, a pedunculate oak in a street of houses. It stands in Babelsberger Strasse, between house numbers 1 and 3.
Free, open at all times: stands in the public street Babelsberger Strasse between nos. 1 and 3, seen from the pavement.
About 1 km from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof (straight line, roughly 15 minutes on foot); stops not checked.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: Landeshauptstadt Potsdam, Naturdenkmal Nr. 36
- potsdam.de
- openstreetmap.org
- wikidata.org
- de.wikipedia.org
