Niedensteiner Tanzlinde

The town and the tree may be the same age, and that is where the number comes from. Niedenstein was founded in the 13th century, local reckoning holds that the lime went in around then, and the resulting estimate is a wide 700 to 1000 years rather than a figure anyone has counted. Nobody can count them: the trunk is gnarled and long past reading. What is measured is the girth, 8.6 metres in July 2021, carried by three trunks that branch low, between one and two metres up, into six main limbs that spread out flat rather than climbing. That shape is not an accident. This is a Tanzlinde, a dance lime, one of the trained trees Hesse and Franconia used as village halls, their crowns worked flat over generations so that a village could dance up in the branches. Northern Hesse has a whole family of them, and this one stands alone in its town rather than in a cluster, about twenty kilometres from the trained limes around Malsfeld. It sits in Niedenstein west of Kassel, on open public ground, protected as a Naturdenkmal, and it is one of very few German trees with a Wikipedia entry to itself rather than a line in a register.