Large-leaved Lime

A lime has marked the exact spot where three Brussels communes meet since at least 1777, and that is the sort of job this species keeps getting: boundary post, landmark, the tree a place organises itself around. This page maps every large-leaved lime on the site, 14 so far across 11 cities.

Munich protects one of these in law for its bizarre growth, which is an unusual reason to make a tree a natural monument. Prague has one a president refused to lose, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk having had a castle terrace built around it. Telling a large-leaved lime from a small-leaved one is harder than it sounds, and under Nuremberg's 400 year old tree the sign and the botanists who have looked at its leaves still disagree. Seven are mapped across six cities, among them an Antwerp linden protected since 2010 for precisely where it stands rather than for anything rare about the tree itself.

Prague

Masaryk's Lime

estimated over 200 years · Hradcany, Prague Castle

A president picked a tree, and an architect built a terrace around it.

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Vienna

The Lime of the Schönbornpark

187 years, planted 1839 by the city's tree register · Josefstadt, 8th district

Vienna's tree registry lists nearly nine hundred trees in the eighth district and gives this one a girth of 489 centimetres, which makes it comfortably the thickest thing growing in Josefstadt.

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Brussels

Photo: Geert Van der Linden / Flanders Immovable Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0)

The Kasterlinde

200+ years · Berchem-Sainte-Agathe / Molenbeek-Saint-Jean border

A single lime tree marks the exact spot where three Brussels communes meet, and it has been doing the job since at least 1777, when the Ferraris map, the first detailed survey of the Austrian Nethe...

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Krakow

The Daszynskiego Lime

roughly 85 to 130 years · Śródmieście, on the Daszyńskiego avenue

This lime is the youngest of three different Tilia species this page now protects, and the arithmetic that ages it borrows from the other two.

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Munich

Photo: NiamhNature (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Leaning Lime of the Badenburger See

undated in the city register; a tree-recorders' database estimates roughly 180 years · Nymphenburg

Munich protects this lime, in law, for being strange looking.

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The Lime of the Englischer Garten

This lime is already drawn on a plan of the park from 1807, which makes it one of very few trees in Munich with a paper trail.

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The Lime of the Muttenthaler Pond

Solln

The best part of this lime is at the bottom.

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The Lime of Landsberger Straße

Pasing-Obermenzing

Landsberger Strasse is the old road west out of Munich, the one that ran to Landsberg and on toward Augsburg before anybody thought of a motorway, and near its far end this lime holds down a corner...

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Vilnius

The Four-Trunked Linden of Bernardinai Garden

Užupis / Old Town

Four trunks leave the ground here as one tree, and Vilnius has protected the result since 1996 without ever writing down how old it is.

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Antwerp

Photo: Geert Van der Linden / Flanders Immovable Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0)

The Summer Linden of Rivierenhof

unknown, protected since 2010 · Deurne

A single linden tree earned government protection in 2010 not for its species, which is common, but for exactly where it stands: in front of Sterckshof castle, at the heart of a park whose ownershi...

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Dordrecht

The Large-Leaved Lime of Louter Bloemen

roughly 165 to 175 years, from the register's planting band of 1850 to 1860 · Louter Bloemen

This small park is all that is left of a country place, and it reads like one the moment you walk in: dominated by tall beeches, with the light already gone by the time it reaches the ground.

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