The Tarlowska Lime

Krakow already protects one small-leaved lime on this page, a 402 centimetre trunk on ul. Krowoderska whose age comes out at 130 to 175 years by the species' own published growth factor, an unusually exact match between the tape measure and the science. The lime on ul. Tarlowska is the smaller of the city's two, 259 centimetres round, entered onto the register in 2004, seventeen years after most of the trees on this walk. Running the same growth factor against this thinner trunk gives a range of roughly 85 to 115 years, which would put its planting somewhere in the interwar years or just after, plausible for a street lime on a residential road rebuilt more than once since. As with its bigger relative, the number is arithmetic rather than record: nobody has cored it, and the bracket stays wide on purpose. Small-leaved lime was the tree cities across Central Europe reached for through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tolerant of pollution, easy to pollard, long-lived enough to still be standing when the street around it has changed shape several times over. This one is free to walk up to on ul. Tarlowska at any hour.