This natural monument is a street tree. Potsdam protected it on 21 November 2005 as number 33, and the city's own page places it with the precision of a delivery note: in the street Am Kanal, opposite number 71, at the roadside. It is a London plane, the hybrid that lines city streets across Europe, and the city's page marks it as a foreign species. That is part of what makes it odd company. Every other Potsdam tree on this page is an oak or a lime, standing in a park, on a square or at a forest edge. This one stands at a kerb in the middle of town, and made the list anyway. The city's page gives its girth as 423 centimetres; the German Wikipedia list of Potsdam's monuments says 426. Three centimetres is a small enough gap to be a tape held a little higher or lower, and both figures are on record. Either way, more than four metres of trunk at the edge of a road. Nobody has published an age for it, so this page gives none. The most recent photographs we know of were uploaded in December 2020, which is thin proof for today. If you walk past, tell us it still stands. The columnar oaks on Bassinplatz are about 550 metres away, which makes the two an easy pair for a walk through the centre.
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.
Am Kanal, across from no. 71, at the roadside, 14467 PotsdamYou can recognise it as the plane tree at the roadside of Am Kanal, directly across from number 71, its trunk more than 4.2 metres round.
Free, open at all times: stands on the street edge of the public road Am Kanal, seen from the pavement.
Central Potsdam; about 550 m (straight line) from Bassinplatz, the tram and bus hub, which is also where the Bassinplatz columnar oaks stand.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
