Pfarrlinde (Frankenthal, Sachsen)

A pastor's wife had this lime planted in 1783 to mark the birth of her first son. Her name was Theodora Janicaud, the year is documented rather than estimated, and the tree has outlived the boy and every state that has governed this hill since. It stands alone on the Pfarrberg, the hill above Frankenthal, which is why the village calls it its landmark and why it has taken more weather than a sheltered tree would. The trunk is hollow and carries the scars of past lightning strikes; parts of it were packed with concrete by an earlier generation of tree surgery, and the crown is now held by bracing systems and kept in shape by pruning. It measures 4.05 metres round and about 25 metres tall. The village is also planning for the day it goes: a second lime was planted opposite in the 1990s, deliberately, to inherit the job of being the landmark, and there is a bench beside the old one for people who want to sit with it in the meantime. That is roughly 240 years of continuous local attention to one tree, from a birth in a parsonage to a succession plan, in a village near Bischofswerda that most maps do not bother to name.