The Pollarded Lime of Ugchelen

Over six metres round, measured at chest height, and it stands behind a fire station. That is the whole appeal. Apeldoorn has a royal palace full of documented trees and its thickest and one of its oldest is a lime hidden at an angle behind a municipal building in a village on the southern edge, where you would walk past it for years without knowing. It is a leilinde, a lime that was pollarded and trained flat, which is what people did to a tree standing against a house front: you kept it low, you cut it back hard every few years, and it gave shade in summer without taking the light in winter. The register reads it the same way and supposes there was once a cottage or a small farm here, with the lime trained across its facade, planted somewhere between 1750 and 1800. The village council thought this was worth doing something about. They put up a sign on the road pointing to it, and the town had already put a bench there years earlier, so you can sit down and look at it properly. That is the correct response to a tree like this, and it is rarer than the tree.