The Tullisaari Lime

Finland's thickest park lime grows on an island in Helsinki's own harbour, in a manor garden most visitors reach by accident on the way to somewhere else. Tuurholma, now usually called Tullisaari, was a shipping family's private park until the city took it over, and the trees planted for one household's private pleasure well over a century ago have been growing for the public ever since. The lime's trunk has been measured at up to 450 centimetres around, officially protected since 1956 alongside a scatter of equally outsized specimens across the same small park, including a black alder Finland lists among its thickest, and an oak that stood as a natural monument for six decades before a 2020 storm finally brought it down. The lime alone survived that storm standing, its trunk long since hollowed by age into a shape you can see clean through, held together as much by bark as by wood. Reaching it means crossing the Laajasalo bridge from central Helsinki, a bus ride and a walk of about twenty minutes through what feels less like a city park than a private estate nobody bothered to close the gate on.