The Old Lime Tree of Felsőmocsolád

Local families bring their newborns to this lime, and older children climb through its hollow trunk to prove they are brave. It won European Tree of the Year in 2012 with 11,158 votes, a year after winning Hungary's national contest. It stands in the forest of the former Kacskovics-Bánó estate, about a kilometre east of Bánó Mária Castle, beside the Malom-árok stream. It is 20 to 25 metres tall and put at roughly 400 years old. A Hungarian hiking directory records its circumference as 11.9 metres, a figure that says less about one trunk than about the shape of the whole thing: three thick limbs rising from a hollow base. Read the number as a measure of that base rather than of an ordinary trunk. The village has a legend to match. A great storm, lightning and an explosion of gas are said to have burned the surrounding forest into a chasm called Hell's Mouth, Pokol szája, and this lime alone survived. Crows then carried its seed and sowed the forest again, and a garabonciás, a protective spirit of Hungarian folklore, is said to live in the trunk. None of that is documented history; all of it is still told. The castle is a hotel now, and its own blog describes the tree turning green every spring. The most recent dated report we have is from the 2012 contest, so if you have walked out to it, tell us how it looks.