Körnerlinde (Eichigt)
How do I find it? You can recognise it by its unusual height for a lime, 42m, on a trunk 7.27m round. It stands on the open Husarenwiese meadow beside Eichigt's village church.
On the night of 8 June 1813 the poet Theodor Koerner bivouacked with part of his volunteer corps on the meadow beside this lime, days before a raid on Hof and months before he was killed in action at twenty-one. The village never let go of it. The meadow is still called the Husarenwiese, the Hussar Meadow, and the tree is the Koernerlinde. It is also, by the reckoning of the village itself, the thickest lime and the thickest tree of any kind in the Vogtland district, and second only to the Swedish Oak of Weida across the wider historical region. The tape reads 7.27 metres round. The height recorded by the dendrological register is 42 metres, which is tall for a lime and worth seeing for that alone. Its age is disputed and the gap is honest rather than careless: the village and regional tradition put it at 350 to 400 years, while the register that measured it in February 2024 and found it vital estimates about 500. Take the wider band. Either way it was already a substantial tree when Koerner's hussars lay under it, and it still stands where they did, on open grass beside the church in a Saxon border village with no railway station.
- Species
- Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos)
- Girth
- 7.27 m
- Location
- Beside the church, Eichigt, Vogtlandkreis, Saxony (Eichigt, Vogtland)
- Access
- Free, public. Publicly accessible per baumkunde.de ('oeffentlich zugaenglich'), on the meadow ('Husarenwiese') next to the village church.
- Getting there
- Small village in the Vogtland, Saxony, near the border with Bavaria/Thuringia; no rail station, a car is the practical way in.
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
Discover more
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
Correct a detail on this pageSuggest another tree