The Schlosspark Glienicke Oak

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.