Linde Hochosterwitz

The only written record of this tree's age hangs on its own trunk. A small plaque reads "Linde, Alter etwa 450 Jahre": lime, about 450 years old. That is the tree's own claim, and we have found nothing to check it against. It is not on Carinthia's list of natural monuments, no survey has measured it, and everything we know comes from the plaque and one photographer's pictures. Read the 450 years as the sign's estimate, not a dating. What the photographs do show is a tree built for the number. The trunk is massive and flares into big buttress roots where it meets the slope. Above it the crown divides into upright limbs like a candelabra, with mistletoe in the branches. A wooden bench sits beside it. It grows at the south foot of the hill crowned by Hochosterwitz castle, near Maigern, on open wooded slope with no fence or gate in sight. The castle, which charges for entry, is a few hundred metres further up. Two gaps remain. The pictures were taken in December 2019, bare, so nobody has recorded which lime it is, and we know of no photograph since. If you pass in summer, the leaves would settle the species, and a picture would tell us it is still standing.