The Mahlsdorf Village Lime

In 2021 Berlin's district register dropped two of Mahlsdorf's protected trees, a Balkan horse chestnut and a black poplar, from its list of natural monuments. A crooked, ten metre lime standing in front of the neighbourhood's oldest building was not one of them. The Mahlsdorf Village Lime, a small-leaved lime outside the old parish church on Hönower Straße, has been protected since 1993 for outright rarity rather than size, a designation it has now outlasted two neighbours to keep. Its age is put at a minimum of 300 years, with local historians tracing the planting to the 17th century. Height was never the point: centuries of storm damage bent and hollowed the crown instead of raising it, leaving a squat, mossy shape barely taller than the church roofline while its trunk swelled to a girth of 4.45 metres, wider than many trees three times its height. By 1995 the district judged the limbs unsafe to leave unsupported and spent 8,000 Deutsche Mark bracing them with steel cables and fencing the base, work that still holds the tree together today. It stands on the old village high street, beside a church that itself survived the Thirty Years' War and the 1945 bombing, two witnesses to the same stretch of road that outlasted the empire, kingdom and two republics built around them.