The Schwedenlinde of Brielow

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.