The Wilhelminalinde

Wilhelmina had been queen for eight years before anyone crowned her. She inherited the throne in 1890 at the age of ten, her mother governed as regent until she came of age, and the inauguration finally happened in September 1898. Amsterdam marked it by planting a lime, and the lime is still standing on the Kalverstraat. The address is the odd part. The Kalverstraat is the busiest shopping street in the Netherlands, a canyon of chain stores that hundreds of thousands of people walk down in a week, and the coronation tree sits just off it by the Amsterdam Museum, in the complex that was the city's civic orphanage for four centuries. Commemorative trees are usually the most forgettable objects in a city. They go in at a ceremony, the plaque weathers, and within a generation nobody remembers the occasion. This one outlived its occasion in the most literal way available: Wilhelmina reigned for fifty-eight years, through two world wars and five years of broadcasting to the occupied Netherlands from London, and abdicated in 1948. The tree was fifty. Early in 2025 it was added to Amsterdam's list of two hundred champion trees. What it is not is old. At around 128 it is younger than half the trees on this page, and limes routinely pass three hundred. We have not established which lime it is; several species and hybrids are planted here under the same name. If you know, tell us.