The Black Pine of Ebner-Eschenbach-Park

Ebner-Eschenbach-Park takes its name from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, the Austrian writer whose village stories and epigrams made her one of the most important German-language writers of her era, and this Austrian pine has stood on the park's lawn for longer than the park has carried her name. Vienna protected the tree as a natural monument in 1942, citing its size and its role in the park's landscape, but nobody has published a girth, a height or a planting year for it since, an unusually thin record for a tree the city thought worth protecting outright. Austrian pine, Pinus nigra, is native to the mountains ringing the Mediterranean and was planted across Vienna's parks through the nineteenth century for its tolerance of poor, dry soil, exactly the conditions of ground that had recently been fields rather than forest. This one has had eight decades of legal protection and, going by the timing of that 1942 order, considerably longer than that actually growing. The park itself is small, about 6,200 square metres, bordered by Klostergasse and three other streets in the Cottage district of Wahring, open at all times with playgrounds and lawns around it. It sits roughly 850 metres from the ginkgo and giant sequoia already published at Sternwartepark, close enough to walk between the two on the same outing.