My professional career began in 1979 with the study course in forestry sciences at Goettingen university (Germany), which I completed with my diploma thesis in 1984 and then continued as a research assistant in forest botany with a forest decline-project. For this purpose, investigations on the branching of Fagus sylvatica (European beech) were carried out as part of my PhD thesis with a number of new, surprising and significant results on bud and branching development. These soon led to the development of a completely new inspection key for assessing the vitality of beech trees. Immediately after its first publications in 1985, the method was applied in forestry practice. Based on this, the method was transferred to other tree species as part of my habilitation thesis in 1987, adapted and finally generally modified for deciduous trees of the temperate zone. The method has already been tested in the USA and China and also works there and is established and widely used in Central Europe to assess the condition of trees (‘Roloff score’). After a short 2-year interim period at the Institute of Silviculture in Goettingen in the field of Forest Vegetation Science, I was appointed to the Chair of Forest Botany/Dendrology at the University of Goettingen in 1990 and from there to the Chair of Forest Botany at TU Dresden in 1994. There, the main areas of work were tree-ring research, scientific species identification, tree species monographs, tree water balance and drought stress, urban tree management, tree species selection for climate change, and tree aging. Finally, in 2019, the initiative for a 10-year project with ancient trees in Germany was launched, in which 100 very old trees are searched for, selected and proclaimed as ‘National Heritage Trees’ in order to protect them permanently and so that they can reach an age of 1,000 years with optimal support. This project runs until 2029 and is then intended to be transferred to a new permanent nature conservation category in Germany.