Schloss Linderhof is Ludwig II's smallest palace and the only one he lived to see finished, and one tree in its grounds predates the whole project by two centuries. When the landscape architect Carl von Effner cleared the site for the king's new terraces in the 1870s, a lime already standing where the Wasserparterre would go was left in place rather than felled. It is still there, still named for the king who spared it: the Konigslinde.
0 / 1 bezocht in Linderhof
Foto: Llez (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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Königslinde (Schlosspark Linderhof)
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · roughly 300 years · Schlosspark Linderhof, Ettal
When King Ludwig II laid out the gardens of Linderhof, his smallest and only fully finished palace, the plan called for clearing most of what already grew on the site to make way for Carl von Effner's new terraces. One tree was excused. A lime already standing where the Wasserparterre would go, already old, was left in place and folded into the design rather than felled, and the terrace was built to frame it. It is still there, and it is still the name most people use for that exact spot: the Konigslinde, the king's lime.
It was already around 300 years old when Ludwig spared it in the 1870s, which puts its own planting somewhere near the early 1600s, two centuries before Linderhof existed as anything at all. The trunk is hollow now, with two barred openings, and the crown is held together with cables, an old tree doing an old tree's structural work with some engineering help. A survey in April 2025 measured the girth at 5.88 metres, among the freshest measurements on record for any tree this project publishes.
The palace charges admission for its interior, the grottoes and the golden dining room Ludwig built to eat alone in. The park around the Konigslinde does not, so anybody walking those gardens can stand under the one tree the king decided not to cut down.
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