The Lime of Achterberg

In 1922 this lime was written into the deed of sale of the land around it, obliging whoever bought the farm to keep it standing. Locally it is called the thousand-year lime of Achterberg. The national register of monumental trees rejects that flatly: certainly not a thousand years old, it says, and planted more than 350 years ago. That is still older than anything else on this stretch of the Gelderse Vallei. The trunk measures 6.03 metres around and is now entirely hollow, a standing shell with a fresh stem growing up through the middle of it. It grew in the voorburcht, the outer bailey, of Kasteel Levendael. The castle was pulled down around 1820 and a farm went up on the site, so the tree is the last living piece of the place. Old Germanic custom held court under a lime, and local tradition says justice was done under this one, which is tradition rather than record. The deed did not settle the matter. By 1965 the tree was in poor enough condition to be scheduled for felling, and the Copijn brothers argued for treating it instead. The techniques they used here are part of how tree surgery arrived in the Netherlands as a trade. Dutch arboriculture has a founding patient, and this is it.