What is the oldest tree in Potsdam?
The oldest tree on this page is the oak at the Jägerhof in Volkspark Klein-Glienicke, roughly 300 years old and 566 centimetres round when it was last measured in 2023. Roughly, because no register here records ages at all: Berlin's list of natural monuments, which protects all four of these trees, gives each one a number, a species, a cadastral parcel and a sentence saying where it stands, and stops. The 300-year figure comes from a German veteran-tree archive reasoning backwards from the Jägerhof itself, which was built before 1830 with the oak already standing beside it and, in that archive's judgement, already more than a century old. The other three trees, two small-leaved limes and a second oak, have no published age anywhere, so this page gives them none rather than a guess.
All four of these trees sit in a strip of parkland that reads as Potsdam and is administered as Berlin. The Glienicke bridge is the border, the tram from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof crosses it in twelve minutes, and the parks on the eastern bank form part of the UNESCO World Heritage site covering the palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin. All four are protected as natural monuments by the Land of Berlin, a legal designation rather than a survey: the register records neither age nor girth nor condition, so three of them carry no measurements here. The exception is the Jägerhof oak, taped at 566 centimetres in 2023 by a German veteran-tree archive, the best documented and by a distance the largest of the four. Three stand within a few hundred metres of the bridge; the oak is fifteen to twenty minutes further south. Three planes in the walled garden behind the hunting lodge are left off, because nobody could confirm public access.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.