The Guided Lindens of Dagobertshausen

Three lindens grow as one group here, trained and pruned together beside a historic stone table once used for village assembly, in front of Dagobertshausen's fortified church. Hollowed out by age and cut back hard and often, they are still, by the local environmental authority's own account, vital. That authority placed the group under Naturdenkmal protection in 2008, estimating the trees were already at least 120 years old at the time, which puts them past 140 today. A 2017 survey measured the recorded specimen at 1.88 metres round and 5.5 metres tall, a cultivated lime the register lists locally as "Holländische Linde", Dutch lime, rather than a wild-growing tree. The group is younger than its neighbours in Berndshausen and Hilgershausen, both a few kilometres away, but it belongs to the same practice: a Hessian village growing its meeting tree into a shape rather than simply letting it stand, so that people could gather under a canopy trained wide and low enough to shelter a crowd underneath it.