The Eichendorff Oak

The poet was christened in a wooden church that has since disappeared, next to an oak that has not. Joseph von Eichendorff, born in 1788 at the palace here in Łubowice, was baptised in a church that once stood near this tree. The church is gone. The palace is a ruin. The oak carries his name and still stands on the open ground by the village square. Two Polish heritage sources agree on what it is and roughly how old: a pedunculate oak of about 300 years, they say, on dendrochronological calculation, so read it as a band of roughly 270 to 330 rather than a birthday. If that is right the tree was already seventy years old or so on the morning of the christening, and it has since watched the palace beside it fall into ruin and the region it stands in change country. It is a pomnik przyrody, a natural monument, which in Poland means nobody may fell it. Eichendorff became one of the central poets of German Romanticism, and the village trades on him: the palace ruins, the park and a museum room devoted to him are all a short walk from the trunk. Nobody has published a girth for this oak. If you get a tape around it, tell us.