The Romans picked this spot in about 12 BC and built a fort on it, because from sixty four metres up you can see the Waal, the Ooijpolder, the Betuwe and most of the way to Arnhem.
Common Lime
Groningen's oldest tree is one of these, about 340 years old at a farmhouse called De Rollen, and so is the peace tree Antwerp planted on its Grote Markt on 3 September 1994. This page maps every common lime on the site, 24 so far across 17 cities.
Common lime is a hybrid of Europe's two wild limes, and it took over the north as the tree you plant in rows: along canals, up drives, around squares. Most of the ones here are what is left of a row. Utrecht has a canal stretch named Onder de Linden, under the lindens, in the 17th century, and out at the Uithof a linden that went into the ground around 1750 when the land around it was farmland. The veteran at Clingendael in The Hague is the last member of a row that stopped being one long ago. Helsinki's is the thickest park lime in Finland, on an island in the city's harbour.
Nijmegen
The Hague
This linden is the last member standing of a row that stopped existing as a row sometime in the last three centuries.
Groningen
Groningen's oldest tree grows exactly where the national heritage register says it should: in front of the farmhouse at De Rollen, a moated farm complex on the city's northeastern edge, planted in...
The organisation this tree was planted for was not yet fifty years old when it got its own tree, whatever the sign says.
Utrecht
Photo: Hansmuller (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This linden has outlived the entire farming landscape it was planted into.
Photo: Basvb (CC BY-SA 3.0 NL)
The southern stretch of the Nieuwegracht has been called Onder de Linden, literally under the lindens, since at least the 17th century, when the canal first got a uniform planted row of trees in 1660.
Helsinki
Finland's thickest park lime grows on an island in Helsinki's own harbour, in a manor garden most visitors reach by accident on the way to somewhere else.
Maastricht
Vrijthof takes its name from the churchyard it once was, the free forecourt of the Basilica of Saint Servaas that doubled as a burial ground through the Middle Ages, before it became the wide publi...
This lime was planted on Keizer Karelplein to mark the birth of Princess Juliana in April 1909, the future queen who would go on to reign over the Netherlands for 32 years, and the tree still carri...
Haarlem
This common lime is the youngest of Kenaupark's protected trees, planted in the early twentieth century, decades after the Zocher family's 1865 design had already matured into the park visitors wal...
Tallinn
Photo: Olaf Meister (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A chronicler is said to lie under this lime.
Two limes, planted in 1883 to mark two hundred years of one family at one address.
Antwerp
Photo: Geert Van der Linden / Flanders Immovable Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0)
The Peace Tree of the Grote MarktYoungest tree
The youngest tree on this list stands in the middle of the oldest square.
Alkmaar
The register says this is the thickest lime on the bastions, which is a small crown and a well-defined one, because the bastions are a closed set.
Apeldoorn
The register gives this lime the same planting band as the oak at the palace, 1600 to 1700, and unlike the oak it offers no reasoning at all.
Over six metres round, measured at chest height, and it stands behind a fire station.
Deventer
There was a holy oak on this spot and when it died they replaced it with a lime.
Emmen
The oldest part of Emmen is a street, and this is the tree on it.
Haarlemmermeer
In 1923 the Netherlands marked twenty five years of Queen Wilhelmina on the throne, and this lime went into the ground in Vijfhuizen to mark it, one of many jubilee trees planted across the country...
Hilversum
Wilhelmina was eighteen when she was crowned in 1898, and the country marked it by planting limes.
A lime was the safe choice, and that is the point of it.
Oss
This lime stands by Macharen's Sint-Petrus-Bandenkerk, on the village square, banded by the national tree register to a planting around 1840, roughly 190 years old.
A second lime in Macharen, on the Hoogstraat by what the register calls Basisschool De Linde, a primary school apparently named for this very tree.
Roosendaal
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.
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