Ivenacker Eichen, Natural monument and game reserve in Ivenack, Germany.

Ivenacker Eichen is a 75-hectare wood pasture and game reserve west of Ivenack in Mecklenburg. About 240 trees there exceed one metre in trunk diameter, most of them oaks. Five pedunculate oaks are especially old; the largest, the Große Eiche, is 32 metres tall with a trunk circumference of 11.70 metres at breast height.

Slavs used the woodland as a wood pasture a thousand years ago, and around 1300 the cattle of the Cistercian nunnery at Ivenack were driven into it. In 1710 the area was fenced off, creating a game reserve where fallow deer were released for hunting. The enclosure was dissolved in 1929 and re-established in 1972 on about 75 hectares.

The area served for centuries as a wood pasture where pigs foraged for acorns beneath the canopy, helping to keep the forest floor open. Fallow deer now graze among the oaks in the enclosure, recalling this earlier use.

The treetop trail climbs upward and ends at an observation tower from which you can see over the canopy and as far as Lake Ivenack. The path is about 600 meters long and easy to walk.

The largest oak, called the Große Eiche, has a trunk circumference of 11.70 metres with bark and grew only about 1.16 centimetres per year between 1804 and 1995. In 1806 locals hid the valuable breeding stallion Herodotus inside a hollow oak trunk to keep it from the French, but the horse's whinnying gave it away.