Seasons1 of 4
Germany has five lime trees with a dance floor built into the crown, and this is the oldest and thickest of them. The octagonal platform sits about two and a half metres up, reached by a solid staircase, and it is still danced on. The Tanzlinde Sachsenbrunn association has run a linden festival here every year since 2010. The tree first appears in writing in 1662, in a community inventory that calls it one of "zwey Lindlein", two little lindens. That places its planting in the years just after the Thirty Years' War ended, which is where the estimate of roughly 350 to 360 years comes from. Baumkunde's register measured the trunk at 4.76 metres round in June 2026, up from the 4.3 metres recorded in 1994. The same two sources disagree about its height, 10 metres against 13, and nobody has settled which is right. The other four dance limes stand at Effeltrich, Limmersdorf, Peesten and Oberstadt. This one is short, broad and heavily built, less a specimen than a piece of village furniture that happens to be alive, out in the open by the Werra bridge with a staircase up its side. Sachsenbrunn puts a lime on its coat of arms, and this is the tree it means.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Hauptstrasse, near the Werra bridge, Sachsendorf, Sachsenbrunn (Eisfeld), Landkreis Hildburghausen, Thuringia, Germany
You can recognise it by the octagonal dance platform built into its crown, reached by a staircase up the trunk. It stands in the open beside the Werra bridge in Sachsendorf.
Rural village near Eisfeld, Thuringia; no rail station in Sachsenbrunn itself, nearest is Eisfeld about 5km away. Own place, not a day-trip extension of a published city (nearest published city is 35.9km away).
In bloom
scented pale yellow lime flowers, loud with bees
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.