The Moltke Lime of the Kahnweiher

Most of the Koelner Stadtwald is younger than it looks. The park was laid out from 1895 onward as a purpose-built recreation ground, and its own history notes that most of what grows there today is under eighty years old, ordinary planting for a public forest of that age. The Moltke lime by the Kahnweiher, the park's rowing pond, is one of the exceptions: a comparatively uncommon large-leaved lime hybrid old enough to have earned individual protection as a city natural monument, standing where the Stadtwald's own account says older tree stock was folded in from estates that predated the park itself. Nothing on record gives this specific tree a planting date, so its age stays an honest gap rather than a guess, and the case for its age rests on inference about the ground rather than a measurement of the trunk. Two registered copper beeches grow at the same spot, close enough to make this corner of the Stadtwald a small three-tree cluster rather than a single stop. Existence here rests on the city's own designation register alone. Nothing contradicts it, and the register has been reliable everywhere else in this city, but it is the thinnest-evidenced of Cologne's trees so far. The Stadtwald is public land, free and open at all times, a walk of about 1.5 kilometres from the Hohenlind trees.