Seasons1 of 4
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.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Beside the church, Eichigt, Vogtlandkreis, Saxony
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.
Small village in the Vogtland, Saxony, near the border with Bavaria/Thuringia; no rail station, a car is the practical way in.
In bloom
June, when it flowers over the Husarenwiese, the same weeks the hussars camped here
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.