What is the oldest tree in Schenklengsfeld?

In the heatwave of 2018 the village fire brigade pumped 100,000 litres of water onto this tree, and the water was not sentiment: at 17.91 metres round, measured on 15 July 2007, it may be the country's oldest broadleaf as well as its thickest trunk. It is also only about 10 metres tall, the crown having come down over centuries. What stands now is four separate living trunk sections around the rim of what was once a single stem, carried by a wooden scaffold of some 80 beams running roughly 65 metres. The age is genuinely unsettled: a twentieth-century stone marker claims a planting date of 760, roughly 1,270 years, while published dendrological estimates range from 600 to over 1,300 years, and none of them is treated here as the winner. What is documented is the work it did: Schenklengsfeld held its court under this lime without a break from 1557 to 1796 and intermittently afterwards, with the market and dancing happening here too. Restoration crews came in 1976, 2009 and 2020. It stands free on the village market square, roughly 10km southeast of Bad Hersfeld, Hesse, reachable by car or regional bus with no rail station in the village.