The Peace Limes of Gentpoort

Bruges planted its peace trees ten years after the peace. Three silver limes went into the ground at the Gentpoort in 1928 as vredesbomen, marking the city's liberation, on the ring of landscaped ramparts that replaced the medieval defences. Flanders' heritage inventory, the only source that records them, measured the thickest at 328 centimetres round and 35 metres tall, which is a great deal of lime for a tree not yet a century old. Silver lime is a good tree to choose when you want the planting noticed. Tilia tomentosa carries a dense white felt on the underside of every leaf, so the crown turns pale and changes colour whenever wind gets into it, and in July it flowers hard enough that you smell it before you have picked out which trees it is coming from. The ramparts path is what turns these three from a glance into a detour. Four hundred metres along it stands a black poplar planted in 1853, when the city was busy turning its defences into a park, so the two entries make one short walk instead of two separate errands. What the inventory does not say is which of the three carries the 328 centimetres. They went in together and have grown together, and from the path they read as one thing.