The Linden on the Laubegast Riverbank

In March 1940 the biggest Elbe flood of the twentieth century drove ice floes 40 centimetres thick against this lime for ten to fifteen hours. The floes hit both the tree and the masonry surround its owner had built in 1913. The ice tore a wound about half a metre tall around half the trunk, and the ridge it left still shows at roughly 1.5 metres up. The lime was already old by then. The local account has it planted or sown in the second half of the seventeenth century, most likely in the 1670s or around 1680, and in 1997 the owner wrote of a 320-year-old linden. That puts it somewhere near 340 today. The house behind it at number 17 is a youngster by comparison, built in 1879 for a Saxon court marshal and now a listed monument in its own right. It is a small-leaved lime, about 20 metres tall with a trunk 3.90 metres round, standing outside the ice-protection wall beside the road. The paving over its roots was replaced with cobbles to protect them, and the city made it a natural monument in June 1999. Just north of the driveway the road closes to cars and becomes part of the Elbe cycle route, and two more protected trees stand about 500 metres away in each direction along it: black poplars at number 1 and a black pine at number 39.