The Gnarled Lime of Hallerwiese

Lightning has struck this lime and a storm has taken pieces off it, and it is still putting on growth. Nuremberg's own survey of the city's oldest trees describes it as a gnarled linden of roughly three hundred and fifty years at the southern end of the Hallerwiese, damaged and healthy at the same time, which is a fair summary of what that many centuries do to something that cannot move. It is protected as ND-5 on the city's 2020 natural monument ordinance. What nobody has settled is which lime it is. German parks of this period were planted with three of them almost interchangeably, summer lime, winter lime and the hybrid between the two, and no source identifies this one, so it stays a lime and goes no further. Three hundred and fifty years covers most of what happened to Nuremberg. The tree was already mature while the city was still a free imperial city answering to nobody but the emperor, and it was well over a century old when that ended in 1806 and Nuremberg was handed to Bavaria, bankrupt and stripped of its independence. Two large planes stand on the green immediately behind it, planted at close to the same time. The meadow is free and open, roughly fifteen minutes on foot from the Hauptmarkt.