The losses that have been lamented in the forest after the three most recent years of drought are usually nameless.

The number of trees that have fallen victim to drought stress and bark beetles is too large for that.

The result is large, bare areas - 300 hectares in the Bad Homburg city forest alone.

“The local spruce, pine and larch trees have died out across the board,” says district forester Günter Busch.

The unfamiliar sight touches people, as Matthias Böhm from the Rotary Club Bad Homburg-Schloss has noticed.

The contact restrictions of the corona pandemic would have slowed many social projects.

The decision was made to do something for the forest and to finance new plantings.

Bernhard Biener

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung for the Hochtaunus district.

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The response, also from the other service clubs, was overwhelming, says Böhm.

Three Rotary clubs, the Rotaract youngsters, the Lions clubs, the Zonta club and private partners are involved and have so far raised 45,000 euros in donations.

“A Rotarian project has become a citizen's project,” says Böhm.

That is why the 4.1 hectare area below the Jupiter column not far from the Saalburg, on which 11,000 trees are planted in October and November, is also called Bürgerwald.

"The population suffers too," says Mayor Alexander Hetjes (CDU).

The forest is not just an economic factor.

Remembering the posting of the theses

The dry summers have not only left their mark on the landscape. In Bad Homburg they also demanded a prominent sacrifice: the Luther oak, planted in 1817 in memory of the posting of the theses 300 years earlier, only stretches into the sky as a bare skeleton. “In the three years from 2018 to 2020, the spruce trees around the oak died,” says Förster Busch. As a result, the microclimate changed so quickly that the Luther oaks were unable to adapt. "The crown was now exposed to wind and sun." Light, heat and the lack of water would have damaged the tree. The oak actually loves warmth, but as the saying goes: "The older trees are, the less they like sudden changes."

There are hundreds of memorial trees for the reformer in Germany.

But the Bad Homburg specimen was planted in an unusual year, as Roswitha Mattausch discovered when she was working with the Luther oak.

The contribution by the former director of the museum in the Gotisches Haus, based on a lecture, is contained in the latest volume 31 of the series “From the City Archives”.

Only a very small number of the Luther trees came from 1817. Most of them were younger and were only planted in 1883, on Luther's 400th birthday.

Some, whose history is said to go back to the time of the reformer, did not survive the passage of time.

The Luther oak in Wittenberg, for example, was felled in 1813 during the Napoleonic Wars, replanted in 1830 and damaged by sawing in 1904.