The Last Lime of the Westsingel

This lime is hollow, rotted through the middle, and the last one standing of its row. It still comes into full leaf every spring. The register entry originally covered a whole line of common limes along the Westsingel, planted somewhere between 1750 and 1800. One is left. The municipality's own tree-walk booklet puts a Hollandse linde at this exact spot by the bridge to Museum Flehite and dates it to 1800, the young end of the register's band, so the honest figure is somewhere between 225 and 275 years rather than a single year anyone can point to. Young limes have since been replanted alongside it, which makes the comparison easy: they are the same species and a fraction of the girth. The hollowness is not the emergency it sounds like. A lime lives in its outer wood, and the heart can rot away entirely while the tree goes on putting out leaves; pollarding, which is the form the register records for this one, tends to extend that career rather than shorten it. It stands in front of a museum whose collection includes a painted view of Amersfoort from 1671, made about a century before anybody pushed this lime into the ground. This tree is the last of the avenue that once lined the singel, and it is doing the job of all of them.