The Mariaboom of Marienbosch

A map drawn in 1570 already marks this spot as het Maria en boomken, the Mary and the little tree. A borer put into the linden growing there now returned an age of over two hundred years, which makes the trunk a good deal younger than the name. The Bomenstichting, which took that reading, suspects it stands on the shoulders of a much older root system, though that comes from the continuity of the site rather than from anything measured in the wood. What the hill has seen is a long habit of walking to a tree. Into the early twentieth century a tea pavilion stood beside the linden, where women of the local gentry took their tea in its shade. After the Marienbosch monastery and boarding school went up in 1924, an annual procession set out from central Nijmegen, sang a Marian hymn under the branches and hung an image of Mary in them. A chapel was planned and never built. A stone column carrying a statue of Mary stood here and has since disappeared. The tree sits on a low rise off the main paths in the Marienbosch woods and does not announce itself, so this is one you go looking for rather than come across. Nobody has pinned down which lime it is either: the account that dated it calls it simply a linden. If you can tell a small-leaved from a broad-leaved one at the leaf, tell us which is standing on the Mariaheuvel.