The Dutch Lime of Emile van Loonpark

Roosendaal's Dutch lime in Emile van Loonpark carries a planting band rather than a single year: the Netherlands' national register of monumental trees puts it somewhere between 1750 and 1800. That makes it older than the park around it, which the mayor of the same name only began laying out in 1883, roughly a century after this lime was already growing on the site. The register lists it as municipal property standing on open parkland, one of the smaller number of Roosendaal's trees old enough to carry the monumental designation at all. Its current girth and condition are not recorded in what we could find so far. A common lime this old has usually been pollarded, coppiced or propped at some point, since the species tends to hollow at the base long before it dies outright. Whether this one carries that history is worth a look on the ground. It rests on one source for now, the register itself: if you have stood under it, tell us what you saw.