The Schulmeisterlinde of Kaditz

Few trees come with their planter's own words. On 8 April 1622 Paul Schulze, schoolmaster of Kaditz, wrote in the church chronicle that he had planted a lime beside the churchyard wall, facing the school, and added a line of hope: God help that it may grow well. It did. Four centuries later the Schulmeisterlinde is the oldest tree in Dresden whose planting date and reason are both on record. Schulze put it in at Easter, when the new school year began, four years into the Thirty Years' War, opposite the village school that stood across the street. It has not had an easy four hundred years. In the 1920s the road was widened and the churchyard wall was rebuilt hard against its trunk. On 8 August 1970 the fire brigade cut the crown back drastically because the hollow trunk threatened to break, and it was pruned again in 1999. The hot, dry summers of the late 2010s hit it too. What stands now is a barrel of a trunk 4.4 metres round, hollow all the way through, under a crown reduced to about 8 metres. It has a famous neighbour. Fifteen metres to the south-west stands the Kaditzer Linde, older, wider and far better known, and most visitors come for that one. The schoolmaster's tree is the one with a birth certificate.