The Oak of Steinbruchstraße

On Steinbruchstraße in Riedenburg, an oak has been growing ivy for longer than the street's newest residents have been alive. The street takes its name from a stone quarry that once cut into the nearby Rainberg, the same hillside quarried for stone that went into Salzburg Cathedral, though no record ties this particular tree to that history. It is simply the ordinary oak that happens to stand where the quarry road once ran. Salzburg listed it as a natural monument in 1984, NDM00196, protecting 352 square metres of ground around it. The register's whole description is short. The trunk splits into several strong branches about five metres up, and ivy has climbed most of the way up it. That is what a 1984 designation buys you, a floor rather than a biography, and nobody has recorded when the tree was planted. It stands on an ordinary residential pavement, no gate and no ticket, in the western Riedenburg district a short walk from Salzburg's centre. The most recent photograph anyone has put online of it is from 2014, over a decade old now, so if you walk past and it still looks the way the pictures show, or looks different, that itself is worth telling us. Its age, like its exact place in Riedenburg's quarry history, is an open question rather than a guess we are prepared to make.