The Watermuseum Lime

The national register lists this lime as publicly visitable and then, under visible, writes: unknown. Somebody left that field blank and nobody has been back to fill it in, which is worth knowing before you walk up, because the tree stands tight against the Nederlands Watermuseum in Park Sonsbeek, and the museum occupies the old Bagijnemolen, a watermill turned into a building about water. What the register is sure of is the dating. Planted between 1870 and 1880, which puts the tree at roughly 150 years old. It goes down there under its local name, Hollandse linde, the Dutch term for the common lime, and a common lime is not a tree anybody discovered in a wood. Tilia x europaea is a natural cross between the small-leaved and the large-leaved lime, propagated from cuttings and planted across northern Europe in enormous numbers because it grows fast and takes hard pruning without complaint. The giveaway is at ground level: a common lime throws up a dense mass of shoots around the foot of its own trunk. Compare it with the small-leaved lime a few hundred metres down the Zijpendaalseweg, which keeps its ankles clean. Nothing outside the register has written this tree down, so the planting band is one authority's estimate. Free, public parkland, about twelve minutes on foot from the station.