The Weeping Silver Lime of J.C. Jacobsens Have

Steel cables run between this lime's main limbs, tying them to each other so that none can tear out. It is 27.5 metres tall and 4.77 metres round, and the wires are the price of keeping a tree that size standing over a public path. It grows in J.C. Jacobsens Have, the private garden the Carlsberg brewer had laid out in 1848 by the landscape architect Rudolph Rothe, now a protected monument and open to anyone since 2009. Jacobsen used the garden for trees he brought home from his travels. Whether this one arrived that way is not recorded, and the register does not say who planted it or when. What it is, is a weeping silver lime, Tilia tomentosa in the cultivar that lets its branches hang. The leaves are dark above and white-felted underneath, so the whole crown flickers silver when wind gets into it, and the hanging habit means the outer branches come down almost to head height while the tree goes up nearly thirty metres behind them. The Danish register files it under Ungarsk Solvlind, Hungarian silver lime, a local name for this form that it flags as unofficial itself. Nobody has put an age on it. If you know when it went in, tell us.