The Sully Lime of Pesselières (Le Sully de Pesselières)

France has hundreds of trees called a Tilleul de Sully. This one has a birth year, and a party to prove it. Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully and Henri IV's chief roads officer, spent the years after the Wars of Religion pressing villages to plant a lime or an elm by the church or on the square. Most of the trees carrying his name inherited it by association. Le Sully de Pesselières is dated: planted in 1598, according to the regional paper L'Yonne républicaine, which is also why the hamlet held two days of festivities for its four hundredth birthday in 1998. That puts it at about 428 years now. Pesselières is a hamlet inside the commune of Sougères-en-Puisaye, and the lime stands out in the open near the rue du château and the old halles. There is a photograph of it from the early twentieth century and more from 2008 and 2014, so the last hundred years of it are on record, which is rare for a tree this far off the main roads. Nobody has published a measurement of the trunk. Surveys of other Sully limes put the type at five to seven metres round, but those are other trees. If you go with a tape measure, tell us the number and we will add it. Thirteen walking routes through the Puisaye pass it, which is roughly what Sully had in mind: a tree where the road goes.