When the Leaves Turn Around Berlin, Tree by Tree
Drag a date through the autumn and see where every tree the German weather service watches around Berlin usually stands that day: green, turning, half coloured or half bare. Switch between beech, oak, birch and horse chestnut, and pick one of six places worth the trip.
Data: Deutscher Wetterdienst phenological annual reporters, stations within 100 km of Alexanderplatz, 2015 to 2025. "Half coloured" and "half bare" follow the DWD definitions of autumn colouring and leaf fall. Door-to-door times from Alexanderplatz on a Saturday from the VBB timetable, checked on 22 September 2026. Sunset is calculated for Berlin.
Every autumn the same question comes up: is it worth going out to the woods this weekend, or is it too early, or already over? The German weather service has an answer hidden in its records. Volunteer observers follow the same trees around Berlin every year and note the day about half the leaves have turned and the day about half have fallen. This map puts eleven years of those records for the area within 100 km of Alexanderplatz on one date slider. The dots are the individual trees; the bars show the whole season for each species; the six places below tell you how their main tree is doing on your date and when to leave Alexanderplatz to have three hours of daylight there. Beech, the tree with the strongest colour, is usually half coloured on 21 October and half bare on 4 November, so the last full week of October is the one to keep free.
What the dots mean
Each dot is one tree a DWD observer watches within 100 km of Alexanderplatz. Its colour shows where that tree usually stands on the date you pick, from its own median dates between 2015 and 2025: green, turning, about half the leaves coloured, falling, or about half the leaves down. A hollow dot means that station has no record for the species you picked. Single trees are noisy, so read the pattern, not one dot.
What the bars show
For each species the orange bar covers the middle half of all colouring records and the brown bar the middle half of all leaf fall records, with the median marked. The yellow band between the two medians is the good time for a walk. The dashed line is the night the clocks go back, which moves sunset about an hour earlier in the middle of the beech window.
How the six places are rated
Each place is rated by its main tree using the regional season for that species, and the leave-by time gives you three hours of daylight on the ground after the door-to-door journey from Alexanderplatz. Most forest around Berlin is pine, which does not change colour, so the six places are the lake shores and beech woods where the broadleaf trees are.
What it cannot tell you
A single year can run about ten days early or late, and a dry summer or an early storm can strip the trees sooner. Check the weather and the trees near you before a long trip, and check the VBB journey planner for the day you travel.