The Sessile Oak of Paetowstrasse

Four and a half metres of sessile oak stand beside a dirt track, at the edge of an allotment colony in the Templiner Vorstadt. Potsdam lists it as natural monument number 39 and gives two reasons for protecting it: its scientific value, and its character and beauty. The girth is the number everyone agrees on. The city's own page, the German Wikipedia list of Potsdam's natural monuments and the OpenStreetMap entry all give 450 centimetres. The city's page adds that the species can reach six metres round, which puts this one three quarters of the way there. It is also easy to find. The unpaved southern stretch of the Paetowstrasse runs past the Kolonie Sternschanze allotments, and the oak stands about five metres off the track. A photograph from January 2021 and a map entry from the same year put it on exactly the same spot, which is why the pin here sits on the tree. The coordinate in the public list of Potsdam's monuments is about 26 metres out. The thin part is the recent past. That 2021 photograph is the latest sighting we have, and nobody has published an age for the tree. If you walk past, tell us it still stands, and if you know how old it is, tell us that too. The Hauptbahnhof is about 20 minutes away on foot. Some 80 to 100 metres south-west, the register lists a group of Turkey oaks as monument number 40.