The Forster Linde

Aachen's oldest tree used to help decide who died. The Forster Linde hosted a manorial court until 1390, when judgments, including death sentences, were handed down in its shade before the condemned were led away to a gallows field nearby called the Galgenpley. The restored medieval magistrates' house it once served, the Schoffenhaus, still stands beside it. Nobody has ever put an exact number on its age. In 1852 the garden architect Prince Puckler-Muskau, visiting the site, judged it 'more than 800 years old', and every account since has simply carried that estimate forward, which puts it at roughly a thousand years today. Its trunk measures close to ten metres around at the base, and about three centuries ago the original stem broke away high in the crown, leaving five major limbs to fork upward from what remains, each now thick enough to pass for a tree of its own. The wounds have not always been treated kindly. Post-war arborists packed its hollows with concrete, a repair method abandoned decades ago as more harmful than the rot it was meant to stop. Cables now hold the crown together instead. It has been a protected natural monument for more than thirty years, fenced at the roots but otherwise open to anyone walking the street that carries its name.