The Great Lime of Grange Sauvaget

Depending on who measured it, this lime is either 17 metres round and the largest in France, or 13.2 metres and merely enormous. The 17 metre figure sits on tourist pages and appears to trace back to a measurement around 2003. In August 2009 a specialist put a tape around the trunk himself and got 13.2 metres at chest height, 12.9 lower down, and published the discrepancy rather than quietly picking a side. He could not say whether the gap is method or whether the tree has genuinely lost girth, since older photographs do show a fatter trunk. So 13.2 is the figure here, and the largest-in-France billing stays a billing. The age runs the same way. Local tradition has it planted in 1477 for the marriage of Marie of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold, to Maximilian of Habsburg, which would make it about 550. The same 2009 visit read the trunk dendrologically and came out at no more than 250. Three centuries of disagreement over one tree, unresolved. What nobody argues about: it was declared of public utility in 1996, a barrier rings the trunk to keep feet off its roots, and when an autumn storm took a large limb in 2019 the commune of Bracon launched a campaign to save it that reached regional television. The trail out from Bracon has parking at one end and a picnic table at the tree.