Lampėdžiai Beauty Linden

Four trunks, five crown tops, and by local tradition it began as five lime saplings planted together in one spot. However it got that way, the result measures 7.20 metres around at chest height, which is a coppice measurement rather than one clean trunk, stands 23 metres tall and carries a crown 22 metres deep. Lithuania made it a gamtos paminklas, a nature monument, in 1968, the country's highest tier of protection, and the journal Miškai later put it among the ten most distinctive trees in the land. Locally it is simply Gražuolė, the Beauty. Its age is an open question and we are not going to invent one. The usual method, girth read against a growth rate for the species, falls apart on a four-stemmed tree, because each trunk may be regrowth of a different age around a much older stool. No source we found gives a figure. If you know of one, or somebody has taken a core, tell us and we will put it on the page. The state description says it has passed its natural maturity and entered decline, which is a life stage rather than an emergency; it is still listed locally as a place worth going to see. It stands at Romuvos gatvė 57 in Vilijampolė, on the north bank of the Nemunas about four kilometres from central Kaunas.