The Schwedenlinde of Brielow
Brielow, Gemeinde Beetzsee
Seasons1 of 4
Brandenburg's thickest recorded tree stands in a village churchyard, not a forest, and it has been quietly falling apart for longer than anyone alive has watched it happen. The Schwedenlinde, a large-leaved lime in front of the Dorfkirche Brielow, measures roughly 11.5 metres round, wide enough that Welt.de calls it plainly the fattest trunk in the state. The trunk split into two long ago and has been held together with straps and cables since at least 1880, repaired again after storm Kyrill tore through the region in 2007. Its age is read two ways. German Wikipedia gives 400 to 500 years; a more recent survey by the tree register baumkunde.de, taken in 2025, gives 500 to 600. Nobody has settled it, so the honest figure spans both. What nobody disputes is that the tree is old enough to have earned its name from a story rather than a record. A Swedish officer, killed in the Thirty Years' War, is said to have been buried beneath it by the woman who loved him, and the tree has carried his memory ever since. Wikipedia states this plainly as legend, not documented fact, and so do we. It grows in the open, on the churchyard in front of the village church, free for anyone to walk up to. The German Dendrological Society keeps it on its list of the country's record trees, and it was last photographed alive and standing in November 2025.
From people who stood here
No notes yet
Did you visit the tree? Leave a note for the next visitor.
Getting there
Churchyard of the Dorfkirche Brielow, 14778 Brielow, Gemeinde Beetzsee, Landkreis Potsdam-Mittelmark, Brandenburg, Germany
You can recognise it by its trunk, split into two massive stems long ago and strapped and cabled together, repaired again after storm Kyrill in 2007. It stands on the open churchyard in front of Brielow's Dorfkirche.
Free, no permission needed. Stands on the open churchyard in front of the Dorfkirche Brielow, in the middle of the village.
Rural Brandenburg, no train station in Brielow itself; Brandenburg an der Havel is roughly 10 minutes away by car or bus.
In bloom
late June into July, when the lime flowers open over the churchyard
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.