The Silver Lime of Stroinksbleekweg

A silver lime has held this street corner since the 1880s and nobody wrote down why. The Bomenstichting register puts the planting between 1880 and 1890, which makes the tree roughly 140 years old, designates it monumental, and then leaves its history field blank. It is also the only source that names this tree at all. Tilia tomentosa is the lime you notice in wind. Its leaves are dark green on top and coated underneath in fine white felt, so a gust turns the whole crown silver and then back again. It also flowers weeks after every other lime in the street, in high summer, with a scent that reaches you before the tree does. The corner is in Roombeek, the district rebuilt after the fireworks depot went up on 13 May 2000, killing 23 people, injuring around 950 and flattening hundreds of homes. The blast site is roughly a kilometre south of here. What happened on this corner that afternoon is not recorded in anything we have been able to find, and assuming an old tree survived a disaster because it is old and standing is exactly the kind of tidy story that turns out to be wrong. If you were here, or know what this corner looked like that week, tell us.