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.
Common Lime
Tilia x europaea
Common lime is a hybrid of Europe's two wild limes, and it took over the north as the tree you plant on purpose: along canals, up drives, around squares, and in the middle of villages where decisions were made. We map 41 of them, in 28 cities.
Hilvarenbeek's aldermen read out the local decrees under theirs before the village had a noticeboard. The Linde van Sambeek is the thickest lime in the Netherlands at 7.97 metres round, hollow, with a second stem grown up inside the shell after storms took its crown in 1884 and 1901. Groningen's oldest tree is one, about 340 years old at a farmhouse called De Rollen. On a bare dike near Utrecht, boatmen on the Lek used to steer by a single lime. In Tallinn, one of the Skoone Bastion lindens was already decades old when work began on the bastion it now crowns.
Alkmaar
Tallinn
One of these lindens was already decades old when construction began on the bastion it now crowns.
A chronicler is said to lie under this lime.
Photo: Olaf Meister (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Two limes, planted in 1883 to mark two hundred years of one family at one address.
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.
Leeuwarden
One of these two limes carries a cavity in its trunk the shape of a letterbox.
Most commemorative trees get a plaque.
Leeuwarden's official list of its ten most special trees includes one that people now living watched go into the ground.
The Hague
This linden is the last member standing of a row that stopped existing as a row sometime in the last three centuries.
For eighty years the Blauwe Tram, The Hague's old regional line, rattled past this lime on its way out of the city, and the tree outlasted the tram entirely.
Photo: OSeveno (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Cagliari
Corongiu is three dams stacked up a valley above Sinnai, built between 1867 and 1922 to give Cagliari its first real water supply, and this lime tree has stood at the site for long enough that nobo...
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...
Utrecht
This linden has outlived the entire farming landscape it was planted into.
Photo: Hansmuller (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Boatmen on the Lek used to steer by this lime.
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.
Photo: Basvb (CC BY-SA 3.0 NL)
Nijmegen
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.
Dordrecht
This lime has been spared once already.
Amersfoort
This lime is hollow, rotted through the middle, and the last one standing of its row.
Every other old lime along this quay was cut back hard and made to grow again.
Two official sources agree that this lime was planted for the House of Orange and disagree about which occasion.
Antwerp
The Peace Tree of the Grote MarktYoungest tree
The youngest tree on this list stands in the middle of the oldest square.
Photo: Geert Van der Linden / Flanders Immovable Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0)
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.
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...
Den Bosch
The convent burned down in 1584 and was never rebuilt.
Photo: Hans Hagenaars (CC BY 3.0)
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.
Galenbeck
Galenbeck's linden has a dance floor built into its own crown, and it is the last tree of its kind left standing anywhere in northern Germany.
Photo: Lutz Maertens, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Oostkapelle
The oldest tree in Zeeland is either about four hundred years old or about a thousand, and nobody can prove either.
Breukelen
A pair of limes has stood on the castle square of Kasteel Nijenrode long enough that two independent sources describe them in nearly identical words: visible from the park, from inside the castle,...
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...
Hilvarenbeek
Before a village had a noticeboard, it had a tree.
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.
Rhenen
In 1922 this lime was written into the deed of sale of the land around it, obliging whoever bought the farm to keep it standing.
Photo: WeeJeeVee (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Roosendaal
Somewhere under this lime's roots lies a bottle with a letter in it.
Sambeek
There is a second trunk inside this hollow one, and it is the same tree.
Photo: RuudSteg (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Westerlo
This lime was trained flat.
Photo: Koen Berwaerts (CC BY 4.0)
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