Rothenburg ob der Tauber's old lindens do not stand in the walled town everyone photographs. They grow in the valley below it, along the river paths the town wall looks down on. One carries its own planting date, cut into the wall beside it: 1587. Two more, each on record with a Bavarian register number and nothing else, stand roadside by working mills two kilometres downstream. A protected pair of spruces over a small waterfall completes the set, on a waymarked trail signposted out of the Altstadt.
0 of 4 visited in Rothenburg ob der Tauber
1
The Great Linden of the Muhlacker
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · about 440 years · Muhlacker, below the Spitalbastei
The town wall beside this linden records the year it was planted. A stone inscription reads "A. 1587 IST DIE LINDEN GESEGZET", the linden was set here, in 1587, which is documentation most trees this age never get. That puts it at about 440 years, and it wears them: a six-metre trunk broken into surviving fragments, an old veteran rather than a whole one, still leafing out every spring.
It was already standing when Tilly's army took Rothenburg in 1631. It has kept the same spot ever since, below the Spitalbastei where the wall runs down to the Muhlacker and the mill ponds.
Somebody was drawing it long before anyone photographed it. On 16 July 1869 the Frankfurt painter Carl Theodor Reiffenstein sat here and worked it up in pencil, titling the sheet "Grosse Linde am Muehlacker in Rothenburg ob der Tauber". That drawing is in the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt, which means a large, notable linden has been recorded on this exact patch of ground for over 150 years.
One thing is unsettled. German sources call it a Sommer-Linde, which is Tilia platyphyllos, the large-leaved lime, though the name is used loosely in some regions for Tilia cordata as well. The leaves would settle it in a second for anyone who knows the difference. If that is you, tell us.
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2
The Fuchsmuhle Linden
Lime (Tilia sp.) · Fuchsmuhle, Tauber valley
The tree listed just before this one in the same Bavarian register is gone. The Detwang linden, natural monument number 44, lost its crown in a storm on the night of 1 March 2020 and was taken down. Number 45 still stands, where the Tauber path passes the Fuchsmuhle two kilometres downstream of the town walls.
What the register holds on it is a point on a map, a species word and a protection order. Linde, natural monument, and after that nothing: no age, no girth, not even which lime it is. Bavaria has protected it, so somebody with authority judged it worth keeping, and the record of the hamlet itself still describes a linden standing there, designated a natural monument, in the present tense. The file ends there.
Which makes it a good tree to go and look at rather than read about. The walk out is level, along the cycle and footpath that follows the river past the old mills, and the Fuchsmuhle is a working guesthouse with the tree beside the road rather than in its yard. Small-leaved and large-leaved limes separate on the underside of the leaf and the tufts of hair in the vein angles, so anyone standing under it in summer can settle in a minute what the register never wrote down. If you do, or if you get a tape around the trunk, tell us.
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3
The Langenmuhle Linden
Lime (Tilia sp.) · Langenmuhle, Tauber valley
The house beside this linden was built in the fifteenth century. Which of the two came first, nobody has written down.
The Langenmuhle is one of the water mills strung along the Tauber below Rothenburg, its main building late medieval, its stone barn dated 1875, and it marks the northern edge of the old town's protected ensemble. The lime beside it is listed separately and on its own account, number 46 on the Bavarian natural monuments register, which records it as a linden at the Langenmuhle and stops there. No age. No girth. Not even which of the limes it is. The record of the place itself still describes a designated linden standing there, in the present tense, and that is the whole file.
Take it as part of the valley rather than as a destination in itself. The Langenmuhle sits 2.3 kilometres downstream of the walls on the Taubertalweg, about half an hour on the flat, on the same path that passes the Fuchsmuhle and its own protected linden. The mill is a private house and farm and the register places the tree by it rather than inside it, so this is one to see from the road.
If you walk out there, two things are worth sending back: whether the tree is genuinely visible from the public road, and anything anyone locally knows about its age.
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4
The Vorbachtal Spruces
Norway Spruce (Picea abies) · Vorbachtal
Germany has a great many Norway spruces. Two of them, standing over a small waterfall west of Rothenburg, are a listed natural monument, and Bavaria registers them as one thing rather than two: zwei Fichten am Wasserfall im Vorbachtal, number 47 on the town's list.
Set your expectations for the waterfall honestly. The Vorbachtal is a narrow wooded valley with a stream running through it and disused limestone quarries along its sides, not a cataract. What the pair have is a setting, water at their feet and a gorge around them, and whoever drew up the designation evidently thought the combination worth keeping. The record of the hamlet of Vorbach still describes the two spruces standing east of it, designated, in the present tense.
Nobody has published an age or a girth for either. Spruce does not reach the ages the limes in this town do, so what is on offer here is the pairing and the place rather than a claim to great antiquity. If somebody local knows when they went in, we would like to hear it.
Getting there is half of it. The W8 Postbotenweg, one of Rothenburg's waymarked walks, heads west out of the town through the Vorbachtal and past Durrenhof, about 2.5 kilometres and forty minutes from the Marktplatz. This one is a walk rather than a stop.
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