The Great Linden of the Muhlacker

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.