Mykolas Oginskis Linden

Four old limes and five young ones stand in a ring on the western side of Plunge Manor Park, and this is the tree the ring was built around. The park's records call it the mother of the planting, which makes the recent saplings a restoration of a pattern somebody laid out well over a century ago. The man it is named for bought the Plunge estate in 1873. Duke Mykolas Oginskis built the park around his palace, and this lime is part of that design rather than a wild survivor the landscaping worked around. Surveys disagree about its size in the usual way: the state register gives 23.6 metres tall and 4.6 metres round at chest height, a 2018 forest service visit made it 27 metres and 4.8 with a sound trunk and a very wide healthy crown, and the park's own trail page prints 21.2 and 4.4. Limes were planted at Lithuanian homesteads as guardians, on the belief that lightning leaves them alone. The Perkunas Oak, 500 metres east and scarred down one side, has done nothing to support the theory. Its age is not recorded anywhere. The species can reach five or six centuries, which tells you what a lime is capable of and nothing whatever about this one. It is a large-leaved lime, so it flowers in June, ahead of the small-leaved limes most Lithuanian parks are planted with.