Tanzlinde (Effeltrich)

The crown of this lime sits eight metres up and runs twenty metres across, flat as a table, and none of that is an accident. Generation after generation trained the branches out sideways onto a scaffold of oak: two concentric ring beams carried on 24 posts, the whole structure standing on a stone wall 49 metres long and 90 centimetres high that circles the trunk. It is still pruned every second year to hold the form. This is a Tanzlinde, a dance lime. The square beside the fortified church of St. Georg served Effeltrich as court and assembly ground as well as dance floor, and music and processions still take place under the disc of leaves. Estimates based on trunk structure and growth habit put the tree at 600 to 800 years old. The village calls it the thousand-year lime, a name handed down at the site rather than a figure anyone arrived at, and it is worth hearing in that spirit. The trunk measures a little over eight metres round: 8.02 metres when Nationalerbe-Baeume took it in May 2024, 7.89 when baumkunde came in July 2025. In August 2024 it was named National Heritage Tree number 39, one of a short national list. Baumkunde's visit the following summer found it vital. The square is open, free, and the tree is unmistakable from the church door.