The Bystrc Lime

In 1933 a neighbour tried to smoke a marten out of this tree by packing the hollow with straw and setting it alight. The lime came through it, and the reason it did is paperwork. Somebody at the heritage office checked and found the tree was already protected, which ended the argument about felling it. It was patched and bound with iron bands instead, and it still wears them. It is the oldest tree in Brno. About four and a half metres round, fifteen metres tall, standing on the square in Bystrc with the pub tables under it. The trunk is hollow and the original wood is gone. What fills the shell now is a tangle of younger stems and aerial roots the tree grew inside itself, and it still sets seed every year. The age is an estimate rather than a count, for the obvious reason: 380 to 400 years as of 2000, so somewhere past four centuries now. When Brno ran its first Tree of the Year contest in 2000, this one won. It went to the national round two years later and came eleventh. Bystrc was a village long before Brno reached it, and people have been gathering under this tree for as long as anyone wrote it down.