The Cielętniki Linden

On the night of 5 October 2017 Hurricane Ksawery put this lime on the ground. It survived, and it still flowers. The trunk is what made it famous: 1,084 centimetres round on the register's official figure, which makes it the thickest small-leaved lime in Poland, and on Marek Kaziak's 2023 remeasurement of 1,069 centimetres the second thickest tree of any species in the country, behind a plane at Chojno. A plaque at the tree offers an explanation for the bulk: the trunk may be as many as eighteen saplings planted together and grown into one body. It stands in the churchyard of the Transfiguration parish at Cielętniki, on an old road toward the Jasna Góra monastery at Częstochowa, and pilgrims walking that road used to stop and tear bark off it, because chewing lime bark was said to cure toothache. In the end the tree had to be fenced to stop them. How old it is depends on who you ask. Local tradition says about 700 years. A 2014 dendrochronological estimate by C. Pacyniak says roughly 550. One account has it planted shortly before 1500, which would make it about 525. Somewhere between 500 and 700 years is as tight as the evidence gets, and a trunk that may be eighteen trees is exactly the sort of thing that keeps the answer loose.