The King's Lime at the Stadsring

Two official sources agree that this lime was planted for the House of Orange and disagree about which occasion. The national tree register lists it as the Juliana-Bernhard wedding tree, for the marriage of Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard in January 1937. The municipality's own tree-walk booklet, describing the same tree on the same raised stone plateau on this corner, says it went in during 1938 for the birth of Princess Beatrix. Both years fall inside the register's 1930 to 1940 planting band, the two occasions are a year apart, and nothing we found settles which one this tree marks. The confusion is almost the tree's own fault. It is a Koningslinde, a selection of common lime bred in the Netherlands specifically to be planted at royal occasions, the tree a town council orders when a wedding, a coronation or a birth needs marking in wood. Amersfoort had two of those within thirteen months and put a lime on a plateau at the corner of the Stadsring and Molenstraat. Whichever event it commemorates, it was in the ground before the occupation and it is still there. Beatrix was born, became queen, reigned for thirty-three years and abdicated in 2013, and the lime has kept its plateau on one of the busiest corners in town throughout.