The Great Lime of Teuchatz

Local legend ties this lime to the Thirty Years' War: soldiers from the Swedish army, the story goes, were buried here in the 1630s and the tree grew from their graves. Nobody can prove the burial, but the tree's girth roughly fits that timeline, tracked at 770 centimetres round in 1990 and 822 centimetres in 2008, which is honest grounds for guessing it is nearing four centuries old if the legend holds and nothing more precise if it does not. The trunk is thick enough that a separate story grew up around it too, that it is really three trees fused into one. Look closely and the case falls apart. Dendrologists who have studied the tree describe a single continuous trunk, heavily buttressed and studded with burls at the base rather than three obvious stems. What has needed real intervention is the crown, cut back hard in recent years and now held together with steel cables above the point, about four metres up, where it forks into several broad limbs. It once spread 26 metres wide. Teuchatz has no railway; the branch line that served it closed in 1968, and no confirmed bus makes the trip either. Getting here from Bamberg means a car and about 25 minutes on quiet roads, at the end of which the tree stands directly on the roadside with nothing between the pavement and the trunk. A war grave for a legend and a trunk that still argues about how many trees it started as.