Horner Linde
How do I find it? You can recognise it by its mass of three trunks fused together, over four metres across, held up since 2026 by a crane-lifted support frame. It stands on the churchyard in front of the Horner Kirche.
Bremen's oldest tree is not really one tree. Three trunks grew together on the churchyard in front of the Horner Kirche and fused into a single mass more than four metres across, and that mass is what the city now props up: in spring 2026 a support frame was lifted in by crane, partly for the tree and partly for the people walking under it. Before there was a city district here there was a court. The medieval Thing known as the dinghe tho dem Horne met on this spot, which makes this a Gerichtslinde, a court lime, and the tree is thought to have gone in shortly after Dutch settlers built the first chapel beside it early in the 12th century. It appears in writing by 1380. Its age is argued over in the usual way, and both figures are worth having. The memorial plaque at its foot and local tradition say about 900 years, tying it to that settlement; a dendrological survey taken in August 2025 reads 600 to 700 years off a girth of 6.1 metres. Documentary dating and growth-rate dating rarely agree on a tree this hollow. Either way it was here for the Hanseatic centuries, and it is still standing on a working churchyard in an ordinary Bremen tram suburb.
- Species
- Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos)
- Girth
- 6.1 m
- Location
- Cemetery in front of the Horner Kirche (Zum Heiligen Kreuz), Horn-Lehe, Bremen (Horn-Lehe, Bremen)
- Access
- Free, public. Stands on the churchyard in front of the Horner Kirche, open ground.
- Getting there
- Bremen district of Horn-Lehe; reachable by Bremen city tram/bus, an ordinary urban stop.
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
Discover more
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
Correct a detail on this pageSuggest another tree