The Silver Lime of Sophiaplantsoen
How do I find it? You can recognise them by there being two of the same tree side by side, and by the leaf undersides, felted white where the common limes around town are green on both faces. They stand on the Sophiaplantsoen strip.
The national register carries these two limes, and in the space where it keeps a tree's history it has written one word: onbekend. Unknown. What it does record is short. Two silver limes on the Sophiaplantsoen, planted somewhere between 1900 and 1910, owned by the city, free for anyone walking past. That is the whole file on them. The species is the interesting part. Tilia tomentosa comes from the Balkans and Anatolia rather than from anywhere near Friesland, and the give-away sits on the back of the leaf: dense white felt underneath, dark green on the face. Turn one leaf over and you have the species. Leeuwarden turns out to hold a small collection of them. One stands on the Druifstreek opposite the Blokhuispoort, another north of it on the Eewal, and this pair a few minutes from the station, which is enough to make silver lime a species you can tick off across a single afternoon in one city. Nobody has taped either trunk, and nothing has been written about the pair beyond the register's two lines. If you know when they went in, tell us.
- Species
- Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa)
- Location
- Sophiaplantsoen, near Lange Marktstraat, Leeuwarden (Schapenweide / Sophiaplantsoen)
- Access
- Free, on the public Sophiaplantsoen green strip near Lange Marktstraat and the station area. Checked against OpenStreetMap (2026-09-10): the surrounding streets (Sophialaan, Van Swietenstraat, Lange Marktstraat) are ordinary public roads and cycleways with no access=private tags, unlike the nearby former Schapenweide estate ground now occupied by the Aegon office campus about 100m away, which this project has already excluded as private (see data/leads/leeuwarden.json). This is a different, public corner of the old Schapenweide name.
- Getting there
- Near Leeuwarden station, on the Sophiaplantsoen/Lange Marktstraat side.
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Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
Trees nearby
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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.
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