Braziūkai Mother Linden

Seven people could hide inside this lime, and an opening near the top of the hollow let whoever was in there look out over the fields. Insurgents of the 1863 uprising against Russian rule gathered at this tree, and the graves from that rising are in the forest nearby. The hollow has since been filled with concrete. The tree is called Motinėlė, little mother. By the state register and the Lithuanian Arboriculture Centre it is the thickest single-trunked small-leaved lime in the country, and how thick depends on who did the measuring: the state cadastre records 8.10 metres at 1.1 metres up, another account gives 8.4, and the arboriculture centre 8.60 at the standard height of 1.3 metres. The height is unsettled the same way, 12 metres by one account against the register's 18. Its age is put at about 300 years, from a 1995 catalogue of Lithuanian natural monuments, and the village is said to have grown up around the tree in roughly that span. Several lindens once stood here, the ones the owls nested in. This is the last. People have hung crosses on it for generations and fixed plaques marking dates that mattered to them, and a small cross is still on the trunk. The register calls it past maturity and stagnating: cavities at the base, fungus near the ground, cracks higher in the crown. It is fenced, tended and signposted, twenty kilometres southwest of Kaunas.