1000-jährige Linde in Reinborn

Fourteen point three four metres around, which puts this among the thickest lime trees recorded in Germany. The name is the least reliable thing about it. Reinborn calls it the 1000-year lime and the municipality repeats the figure on its own tourism page, but nobody has dated the wood. Baumkunde's dendrological estimate is 700 to 1000 years. A separate reading of its growth puts germination somewhere between 1200 and 1500, which would make it nearer 500 to 800. Several hundred years is the honest answer, and the round thousand is folklore that stuck to a good tree. What you actually meet is a tree in three pieces. The old stem has split into three trunk sections, carried by a steel column driven up the middle and a set of cables out to the limbs. At 17 metres it reads as broad rather than tall. The ironwork is not neglect: somebody has been holding this thing together deliberately, and it has been protected as a Naturdenkmal and a Baumveteran since 1928. The 14.34 metre figure was taped on 27 March 2022, and an earlier record has 14.25. It stands on the Kirchberg in front of the cemetery, beside the church, and was probably a Gerichtslinde, one of the trees a village held its court under. Probably is the word its sources use, and it is the word we are keeping.