What is the oldest tree in Potsdam?
The oldest dated tree on this page is the oak at the Jägerhof in Volkspark Klein-Glienicke, just across the Glienicke bridge, roughly 300 years old and 566 centimetres round when it was last measured in 2023. Its rival is the thousand-year oak in the Schlosspark Sacrow, which is thicker at 685 centimetres and carries the bigger name, but the thousand years are the register's name for it rather than a measurement, and nobody has published an age for it. The Jägerhof 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. None of the other seven trees here has a published age, so this page gives them none rather than a guess.
The trees on this page come from two registers on either side of a bridge. Five stand in Potsdam itself and sit on the city's list of natural monuments, which records a number, a girth and a coordinate for each and never an age: the thousand-year oak at Sacrow, the columnar oaks of Bassinplatz, the Weberplatz lime, the oak at the Schiffbauergasse and the trio on the Jungfernsee shore. The other four stand on the Berlin bank across the Glienicke bridge, protected by the Land of Berlin, in parkland that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of the palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin; the tram from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof crosses in twelve minutes. Only the Jägerhof oak has been dated, taped at 566 centimetres in 2023 by a German veteran-tree archive. Two of the Potsdam trees, the Weberplatz lime and the Schiffbauergasse oak, have no recent dated photograph, so if you pass either, tell us whether it still stands. Three planes in the walled garden behind the Glienicke hunting lodge are left off, because nobody could confirm public access.
One of Potsdam's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest.