The Old Lime of Macugnaga (Tiglio secolare)

For centuries the Walser community of Macugnaga gathered under this lime to run its own affairs. The German-speaking Alpine settlers who reached this valley in the Middle Ages held their assemblies and administered justice in its shade, beside the Chiesa Vecchia, the old parish church at Staffa, the way a town hall would do elsewhere. Sources disagree by two centuries on how old it actually is. One count puts it at more than seven hundred years with a trunk seven metres round; another describes five centuries and gives no measurement at all. Neither is a ring count, so both are stated here rather than averaged into a tidier number. By 2019 it stood hollow and visibly frail, some upper branches broken and the crown propped and braced, and it still flowered that July, as it does most years. A tree that has stood on Walser ground for somewhere between five and seven centuries, worked hard enough by age to need bracing, and still puts out flowers every summer is doing what a lime this old is supposed to do. It stands a short distance from the church, near the cemetery, rather than against its wall, so treat the pin as marking the site rather than the exact trunk.