The Kapucínka Linden of Zlatá Koruna

The leaves curl into hoods. That is a real mutation rather than a trick of the light: this lime grows in the cucullata form of Tilia platyphyllos, whose leaf blades roll up at the edges into small cowls, and the tree's Czech name, Kapucínka, comes from that shape. The story attached to the name is older and darker than the tree itself. In 1420 Hussite troops took the monastery, and by local tradition the monks were hanged from the lindens of the avenue that then ran through the grounds. The hooded leaves have been read as a memorial of it ever since. The arithmetic does not support the reading. This tree is put at about 400 years old, which starts it roughly two centuries after the Hussites came through, so whatever it stands for it did not see. What it did see is everything after: the abbey dissolved by imperial decree in 1785, the Schwarzenberg forestry school that briefly took over the buildings, and the long second life of the place as a state monument. It is the tallest of Zlatá Koruna's protected trees and the best known of them, 30 to 31 metres high and five metres round at the measurements taken in the mid 1990s, standing in the main courtyard beside the Chapel of the Guardian Angels. That courtyard is inside the ticket, and the monastery is closed on Mondays.