The Longfellow Linden

In the summer of 1844 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came home to find that workmen had "lopped away the long low branches of my Linden tree, misunderstanding my directions", and he wrote it up in his journal as a small catastrophe. The tree outlived him. It went into the ground around 1800 to 1810, planted by Andrew Craigie, who owned the Brattle Street estate before the poet came to it in 1843, and it stands on the East Lawn of a house that had served as George Washington's headquarters during the siege of Boston a generation before the linden existed. Fanny Longfellow wrote in 1843 of wanting "a linden avenue in which my poet intends to pace in his old age". This is the only tree of that avenue still standing. By 1846 he was describing her reading Heine underneath it. The National Park Service puts it at 82 feet, against roughly 60 for the species, with a trunk 84 inches through, and rates its condition fair to poor: the trunk cavity is filled, cables carry the branches, heavy pruning comes round every five years. Since the early 2000s the park has been growing a genetically identical cutting against the day it goes. The grounds are free and open in daylight; only the house tours are ticketed.