The Leaning Lime of the Badenburger See

Munich protects this lime, in law, for being strange looking. The reason recorded in the city's natural monument ordinance is bizarrer und knorriger Wuchs, bizarre and gnarled growth, together with a striking appearance, which is an unusually candid thing for a protection statute to say about a tree. It earns it. The trunk leans hard out over the Badenburger See and the whole crown follows, throwing its heaviest limbs sideways across the water rather than upward, so the tree reads as a single long gesture toward the lake. A bench sits underneath, facing the Monopteros on the far shore. A German tree-recorders' database measured the trunk at 4.2 metres around in 2014 and the height at 19 metres, and estimates the tree at about 180 years, which would place its planting inside Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell's conversion of these grounds into an English landscape park between 1799 and 1823. That figure is a volunteer estimate rather than an official one, and the city's own register gives no age at all. Come in winter and the case for the tree is at its clearest: bare, every crooked limb legible against the sky, the lake frozen behind it and the pavilion small and white in the distance.