The Weeping Silver Lime of Muinkpark

This lime was planted for a zoo. In 1851 the Ghent natural history society bought 3.3 hectares of meadow south of the old city to keep animals on, and Flanders' heritage inventory records this weeping silver lime as belonging to the first planting generation that went into the ground with them. The zoo is gone. The planting outlived it, and a fragment of those grounds is now Muinkpark, a small public park in the university quarter, with three of the original trees still standing within about a hundred metres of each other. A weeping silver lime is not a wild tree. It is a grafted cultivar of Tilia tomentosa, trained to send its branches back down towards the ground, so the crown reads as a dome you walk under rather than a canopy you stand beneath. The register puts the trunk at over three metres round. The leaves are dark green above and white-felted below, which means the whole tree turns pale and flickers whenever there is wind, and that is the easiest way to pick it out from the ash and the ginkgo nearby. What the register gives is a generation rather than a year, so the age here is a band of roughly a century and a half and not a measurement. Nobody has counted its rings. If a planting record for Muinkpark exists, we would like to see it.