The Linden of King Matthias

A linden propagated from this tree in 2005 had nearly caught up with its parent ten years later. That says less about the sapling than about what is left of the mother. The trunk is eleven metres round and the tree above it is nine metres tall, with a crown spreading five. It once stood 28 metres high and threw its branches 36 metres across. By the early 1950s it was close to finished. The leaves came out small and yellow-green, it barely flowered, and the castle museum's own account of the rescue reads like surgery: dead wood cut away, clay dug out of the cavities, fungicide, the holes sealed, timber props under what remained. That was 1952 and 1953. Irrigation and root work followed in the 1990s. In 2015 the museum director confirmed it was still flowering, and specialists examine it every year and report it in good condition. Seventy years of intensive care is the reason there is anything here to look at. The famous age is inherited, not measured. Tradition has Matus Cak of Trencin planting it in 1301, which is where the figure of over 700 years comes from, and every tourist page in Slovakia repeats it. Slovak Wikipedia states that current methods cannot establish the tree's real age, and a regional paper has argued the legend stretched it considerably. The tree stands fenced off in the castle park, for its own sake. You can look at it. You cannot walk up to it.