The Coronation Lime of the Spanderslaan

Wilhelmina was eighteen when she was crowned in 1898, and the country marked it by planting limes. The register records this as one of them, standing at the crossing of the Spanderslaan and the Oude Meentweg with a wrought iron fence still around it, which is the giveaway: an ordinary woodland lime does not get railings. The register dates the tree to the 1890s, so roughly 130 years, and it is the only source we have located for it. Wilhelmina went on to reign for fifty eight years, through two world wars and an exile in London, and the tree has outlasted her by decades without any sign of stopping. Tilia x europaea is a hybrid Dutch towns planted by the thousand: heart shaped leaves that go butter yellow in autumn, a permanent thicket of shoots around the base of the trunk that comes back however often it is cut, and small yellow-green flowers in late June that smell of honey and pull in every bee for streets around. Look for the mushroom shaped path marker at the junction, number 24591. The tree is beside it, in public woodland that is open all day. If you know whether the fence around it is the original one from 1898, we would like to hear.