The lead managers of the first ever green covered bond breathed life into the classic tombstone concept earlier this month by adopting Cypress trees in the German capital’s botanical gardens for the duration of Berlin Hyp’s ground-breaking issue.

The German issuer sold its Eu500m Grüner Pfandbrief on 27 April via leads Crédit Agricole, DZ Bank, JP Morgan, LBBW and UniCredit and on 8 June the team gathered at the Botanic Garden & Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem.

“Our syndicate said it would be rather a strange thing to give some plastic to commemorate a sustainable bond,” said Bodo Winkler, head of credit treasury and investor relations at Berlin Hyp, “so they adopted for us a certain type of tree in the botanic gardens, Taxodium distichum, which are Cypress plants that are normally found in the Everglades and can grow up to 50 metres high and live for several hundred years.”

The adoption of the trees will last for the life of the Green Pfandbrief.