Dorpslinde van Massemen

In 2016 the country voted this lime its tree of the year, and the tree it beat into second place is called the Thousand-Year Oak of Lummen. The Summer Oak of Vollezele came third. The winner stands on the village square of Massemen and is 7.19 metres round under a crown only about 12 metres tall, which is a very wide tree on a short frame. Its age came out of a laboratory rather than a guess. Ghent University dated it dendrochronologically in 2006 and put it between 378 and 440 years old, which places the planting in the second half of the sixteenth century or the very start of the seventeenth. The band is wide because that is what the method returns, and there is no tidier number to give. Either way it was a full-grown tree long before Belgium was a country. A ministerial decree of 1 February 2001 protects the lime and the square together, as a monument and as a village landscape, so the setting around it is covered as well as the trunk. The measurements above were taken in 2007, so the girth has had nearly twenty years to move since. It is on the Dorpsplein in the centre of the village, free to walk round, with De Lijn buses serving the village.