St. Georgen im Attergau is a village on the Attersee lakes' edge, and its tree stands in a small riverside park in the Gries district, beside the Durre Ager. The Linde im Gries, known locally as the Tausendjahrige Linde, has a trunk a full ten metres round, and local tradition dates its planting to 1114. That would make it close to nine hundred years old, and it is the best-known tree in the whole Attergau region.
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Linde im Gries (the Tausendjahrige Linde)
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · local tradition dates planting to 1114, roughly 900 years · Gries, St. Georgen im Attergau, Upper Austria
Ten metres round is the number that gets repeated about this lime, and it undersells the legend behind it: local tradition dates the planting to 1114, which would make the tree close to nine hundred years old.
That date is a story handed down rather than a document, and the village's own heritage wiki hedges it the same way, saying only that the lime "is said to have been planted" that year. What is measured rather than told is the girth, a full ten metres around a trunk grown into something closer to a small building than a plant, and it is on that trunk, not the legend, that this became the best-known tree in the Attergau, known locally as the Tausendjahrige Linde, the thousand-year lime.
It has earned its keep. Until the 16th century, disputes in the village were settled in its shade as a Gerichtslinde, a court linden. A storm in 1911 nearly finished it, and it was patched back together the following year, then again in 1947 after fire damage inside the trunk. Upper Austria eventually struck it from its register of protected natural monuments, a piece of paperwork rather than a verdict, and a dendrology register still listed it as vital in October 2024.
It stands in a small riverside park on the Attergaustrasse, beside an information pavilion put up in 2006, close enough to the Durre Ager that you can hear the water while looking up at it.
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