The Edigna Lime of Puch

A king's daughter is said to have lived inside this tree for 35 years. The village of Puch tells it of Blessed Edigna, by tradition a daughter of a French king, who made her home in the hollow trunk and a cell beside it. The plaque gives her years as 1074 to 1109, and a small shrine to her is built into the trunk to this day. How old the lime really is, nobody can say. The heartwood is gone, so there are no rings to count and nothing to carbon-date. A representative of the Deutsches Baumarchiv put it at 500 to 700 years in 2008; other estimates run to 1,000 or 1,200. Both camps are guessing from a ruin. It has been pictured since the seventeenth century, including on the Bavarian survey sheet of 1861. A storm in 1880 broke one of its two main limbs, and the rotten part of the trunk was cut away in 1947. The old crown is gone. What stands now is a remnant stem roughly ten metres round, hard to measure because the shrine has grown into it, carrying a dense young crown some 20 metres high. Farmers once fed its leaves to their cattle as blessed fodder, and since 1959 the village has staged Edigna plays every ten years. Our newest photograph is from 2018; if you have seen it since, tell us how it looks. Allow 45 to 55 minutes from Munich via the S4 to Fürstenfeldbruck.