Rothenburg ob der Tauberで最も古い樹木はどれですか。
Rothenburg ob der Tauber's oldest tree is the Great Linden of the Muhlacker, a large-leaved lime growing beside the town wall near the Rossmuhle youth hostel below the Spitalbastei. A stone inscription in the wall beside it reads that the linden was planted here in 1587, which puts it at about 440 years old, one of the few trees in this project with its own planting date carved in stone.
The inscription is unusually direct evidence. Most trees this old are dated by growth models or a source that estimates rather than states; this one has the words carved into the stone beside it, A. 1587 IST DIE LINDEN GESEGZET, the linden was set here. It was already fifty years old when Tilly's army took the town in 1631, the siege the Meistertrunk legend grew out of, and it has kept the same spot on the wall since. The tree has also been drawn. In 1869 the Frankfurt painter Carl Theodor Reiffenstein sat below the Spitalbastei and sketched it; the sheet survives in the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt, so a notable linden has been recorded on this exact ground for over 150 years. One thing about it is still open. German sources call it a Sommer-Linde, the large-leaved lime, though the name gets used loosely for the small-leaved species too, and nobody here has checked the leaves closely enough to settle it. The three other trees on this page carry no age at all, register entries with a species word and nothing more, which makes the Muhlacker linden's carved date the exception rather than the rule.