The Marthalen Oak

The walk to one of the oldest oaks in Switzerland crosses a football pitch, and the village museum that documents the tree advises bringing a ball. The Ortsmuseum Marthalen puts the oak at over 360 years old, with a trunk 1.8 metres across, roughly 5.6 metres round, standing in the Abistwald north of the village. That museum is the only real source on it. Regional tourism pages repeat the same figures back, which is not the same thing as a second opinion, so read the age as the museum's estimate rather than a settled fact. The forest around it does the corroborating. Marthalen's own timber inventory records an unusual concentration of very large stems here, over 112 centimetres in diameter at breast height and predominantly oak, a category with only a few dozen entries in the whole canton. This is not a lone survivor in a plantation. It is the biggest tree in a wood that has been growing big trees for a long time, in a village whose coat of arms is an oak. Which oak it is remains open. Quercus robur and Quercus petraea both grow here and no source we found commits either way. If you can tell them apart by the acorn stalks and the leaf bases, you can settle this for us on the spot. Marthalen is 25 to 30 minutes by direct train from Zurich.