The Old Lime of Stadtpark

The sign at the foot of this tree and the botanists who have looked at its leaves do not agree on what it is. The sign says Winterlinde, small-leaved lime. An independent German tree register assessed the leaf hairiness and concluded large-leaved lime, which is what this page records, with the disagreement left standing rather than quietly resolved. Everything else about it is settled and considerable. Nuremberg's own survey of its oldest trees calls this one of the strongest and oldest in the city, roughly four hundred years old with a trunk about eight metres around, growing in the Stadtpark just south of the Schiller monument and northeast of the pond. It is the best documented old tree in Nuremberg: two independent sources plus the 2020 natural monument ordinance, where it sits as ND-38. Four hundred years puts its first decades inside the Thirty Years War, which emptied and impoverished Franconia and cost Nuremberg a large part of its population to famine and plague while the armies moved around it. It was a sapling then, on ground that was not yet a park. The park was laid out around it much later. The N1 bus stops at Stadtpark, and the walk from the Hauptbahnhof takes about fifteen minutes.