The Oak of Grimmelshausengasse

Vienna protects this oak as a natural monument and has published almost nothing else about it. No planting year, no trunk measurement, no entry in the city's tree cadastre, which lists Vienna's street and park trees by the hundred thousand. There is a register line saying the tree is protected, and there is the tree. Better to say that plainly than to fill it in. A pedunculate oak in the third district is unusual on its own account: Vienna's streets were planted with planes, limes and maples, species that tolerate a pavement, while Quercus robur is a tree of heavy field soil and river meadow and rarely gets a city street to itself. This one stands on Grimmelshausengasse, a short residential road in Landstrasse, roughly midway between the Stadtpark and Rennweg, and somebody with the authority to do it decided it was worth protecting. The street is named after Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, who published Simplicissimus in 1668, drawing on his own childhood in the Thirty Years War, and produced one of the first great novels in German and still one of the bleakest. The oak is nowhere near that old. Nothing at all says how old it is, which is why the age here is empty rather than approximate. Go for the tree, not for the paperwork.