The Waldhaustanne (Zwieslerwaldhaus Silver Fir)

Germany's tallest, thickest and oldest documented silver fir went unrecorded until 2020, when a family out walking reported it. Andreas Roloff of TU Dresden verified the measurements for the German Dendrological Society, and on 23 June 2023 the tree was entered as National Heritage Tree No. 26. The figures earn it: 6.93 metres around the trunk when measured in January 2023, about 53 metres tall, and roughly 605 years old, which puts its first summers in the early 1400s. A survey in 2023 counted 274 species living in and on it. At that point a tree is less an organism than an address. It stands at about 1,360 metres in an old-growth fir stand roughly a kilometre and a half from the Czech border, inside the Bayerischer Wald National Park. That park is Germany's oldest, and the protected forest simply carries on across the border as the Czech Šumava, so the trees here have spent the last half century inside one of the largest wild woodlands in central Europe. Getting to it is about 500 metres of marked forest path from the nearest car park. A wooden boardwalk carries visitors past the trunk to keep boots off the root plate, so this is a tree you look up at from a walkway rather than one you put a hand on.