The Seven-Stemmed Lime of Sauerlach

Seven trunks rise from one base here, and together they measure about ten and a half metres round. Bavaria's list of remarkable trees calls this lime in Sauerlach a textbook example of multi-stemmed growth, and the figure from 2015 is the girth of all seven taken together, not of one trunk. The village's own Wikipedia article gives the same 10.5 metres as a diameter, which no lime on earth could manage; read it as a circumference. It was a beer garden tree first. A photograph from 1930 shows it in the beer garden of the Gasthof zur Post. The inn's garden has since given way to a supermarket, and the lime stayed where it was, in front of the shop on Tegernseer Landstraße, across from the Alte Post. It is protected as a natural monument by the Landkreis München. Its age is put at 180 to 200 years, though both figures trace back to a single source, and nobody records when it was planted. By that reckoning it has stood in the village centre since the early nineteenth century, through every change of use around it. It is a large-leaved lime, the species that flowers first among Central Europe's limes. The S3 runs from Marienplatz to Sauerlach in about 30 minutes, and the tree is a five-minute walk from the station.