The Silver Lime of Widerstandsplatz, Dachau

This lime has a birth certificate of sorts: an information board gives the year it was planted, 1907. That makes it about 119 years old, and for once that is a date rather than an estimate. Twenty-six years after it went into the ground, the Nazi regime opened a concentration camp on the edge of this town, and the name Dachau took on the meaning it still carries. The lime grew on in the old town through all of it, and through the liberation in April 1945. Today it stands on the corner of Konrad-Adenauer-Straße and Pfarrstraße, on the square called Widerstandsplatz, Resistance Square. The Landkreis Dachau made it a natural monument in a 1997 ordinance, which names it a silver lime, a species from south-eastern Europe rather than a native. Its leaves are dark above and felted white beneath, so the crown flickers pale when the wind turns them over. It is also the last lime of the year to flower, in July, after the native limes have finished, and the honey scent carries across the square. Nobody has published its girth or its height. If you stand under it with a tape measure, tell us what you find. Dachau lies about 16 km north-west of central Munich: roughly 25 minutes on the S2, then a ten-minute walk from the station.