The Beatrix Lime

This lime went into the ground on 31 January 1938, the day Princess Beatrix was born. The register still lists it as De Beatrix linde. Dutch towns marked royal births with trees as a matter of course, and this was a birth worth marking: Beatrix was the first child of Juliana, who was herself the only child of Queen Wilhelmina, and the line had been running on a single life for two generations. The baby the tree was planted for became queen in 1980 and stayed on the throne until 2013. The tree has stood on this corner the whole time, including the German occupation that sent the family into exile in London barely two years after the planting. It has not aged as easily as she has. The register's inspectors record dead wood in the top and along the main limbs, and a flush of young shoots breaking out inside the crown, which is what a stressed lime does when it starts rebuilding itself lower down. They want the ground around the roots examined to turn things around. A street tree in trouble is almost always suffering from what is under it rather than what is above. You will find it where two through-roads meet at the Veenendaalplein in Amstelveen, in full view, which the register notes with some approval. Nobody has recorded which lime species it is.