Jahrhunderteiche

Whoever planted this oak measured it first. Seven point seven seven metres tall, a trunk sixteen centimetres through, fifty-one centimetres around at a metre up, and seventeen years old already: the Barmer Verschoenerungsverein had raised the sapling themselves before carrying it into the woods. They put it in the ground on 1 April 1908, with the deputy mayor watching, to mark a hundred years since Barmen was granted its city charter. Those figures belong to the planting day and bear no relation to the trunk you will meet, because the tree has had 118 years since. Do the arithmetic and it germinated around 1891, which puts it near 135 years old. Its clearing carries its name, the Jahrhundertplatz, and a wooden plaque at the trunk still spells out the occasion. The occasion outlived its subject. Barmen stopped being a city of its own in 1929, folded together with Elberfeld into Wuppertal, so the centenary this oak commemorates belongs to a place that no longer appears on a map. The association that planted it did better. The Barmer Verschoenerungsverein still looks after this forest and still walks people out here, most recently on a guided route it put on the calendar for December 2025. Nobody has recorded which oak it is. Stand under it, look up at the leaves, and tell us.