The Annenborch Lime

The convent burned down in 1584 and was never rebuilt. What is left of it is a low mound in a housing estate, and a lime tree standing on top of it. The Annenborch was a house of Augustinian canonesses, founded in 1503 by a knight named Jan Bax, and the fire took it eighty years later. The tree came afterwards, planted on the mound somewhere between 1750 and 1800, which makes it roughly 250 years old and, by local reckoning, the oldest tree inside the boundaries of 's-Hertogenbosch. Local accounts have it surviving the severe storm of 1767, which would put it at the very early end of that planting range or push the range itself back; the two figures sit awkwardly together and nobody has reconciled them. Since then it has watched the fields around it become the Overlaet district, which built itself around the mound rather than over it. It has been legally protected since the 1970s. Rosmalen knows it as the Annenborchboom and treats it as a local figure: in July 2022 residents of the Annenborch care home, named after the same vanished convent, went out in a convoy of wheelchairs to visit it. It stands free and open. The fence is there for the roots, not to keep you off. No girth or height has been published. If you measure it, tell us.