Kongens Have is Copenhagen's oldest public park, laid out from 1606 for King Christian IV beside his new Rosenborg Castle, and its formal linden avenues were planted soon after: Kavalergangen and D...
Small-leaved Lime
For centuries in this part of Europe you were tried under one of these. This page maps every small-leaved lime on the site, 21 so far across 14 cities.
The Gerichtslinde, the court lime, was a real institution: a broad tree on the village square with benches beneath it, where the local court sat in the open because everybody could then see and hear what had been decided. Small-leaved lime was usually the species chosen, since it lives long, takes heavy pruning and builds exactly that kind of wide low crown. The habit of gathering under them outlasted the courts. Carters running between Vienna and Trieste stopped under Ljubljana's Furmanska lipa to buy hay for their horses, and that tree, planted in 1626, turns 400 in 2026. Zurich has been replanting the same hilltop ever since a chronicle recorded 52 limes going in at once in 1474, and twelve limes across ten cities are mapped here.
Copenhagen
Krakow
Four of the ages on this walk come off a tape measure rather than out of any record, and this is the only one where the arithmetic gets to use the tree's own species.
Krakow already protects one small-leaved lime on this page, a 402 centimetre trunk on ul.
Berlin
Photo: Bernard Ladenthin (CC BY 4.0)
In 2021 Berlin's district register dropped two of Mahlsdorf's protected trees, a Balkan horse chestnut and a black poplar, from its list of natural monuments.
Munich
A painter made this tree famous by sitting under it, and the tree has been fighting for its life ever since.
For centuries in this part of Europe, a village's justice was handed down under a lime.
Photo: Peterf, CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A small-leaved lime grows on the working grounds of the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory, Bavaria's royal china works, founded in 1747 and still hand-painting porcelain in the same rondell buildin...
Vilnius
On 18 July 2023 a storm took the top off the oldest lime in Vilnius.
Somebody has carved a chapel into this tree.
Oslo
Before Oslo's Royal Palace existed, this stretch of ground was Sommerro, a meadow the mayor Christian Henrik Stoedt turned into a small rococo garden in 1751.
Boston
In the summer of 1844 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came home to find that workmen had "lopped away the long low branches of my Linden tree, misunderstanding my directions", and he wrote it up in his...
Potsdam
Two hundred metres from this lime tree is the bridge where the Cold War traded people.
People took tea under this lime, and the floor they did it on is still there.
Warsaw
Local and museum tradition names this lime for King Jan III Sobieski, who built Wilanow Palace in the late 17th century and is documented, in general accounts of the gardens, as having planted lind...
Warsaw has protected this lime since 27 December 1990 and has never written down exactly where it is.
Zurich
Zurich's history is often said to begin on this hilltop, a Roman customs post and later a Carolingian imperial palace, and lindens have been planted here continuously since at least 1474, when a ch...
York
Tilia cordata, the Small-Leaved Lime, is Britain's only native lime, and in the wild it all but disappears once you travel north of the Midlands, which makes the twenty-five metre example growing i...
Delft
This winter linden did not grow from a seed that fell nearby.
Ljubljana
Carters bound between Vienna and Trieste used to stop under this linden to buy hay for their horses, and the trade gave the tree its name, Furmanska lipa, the Carter's Linden.
This linden and the garden around it were planted the same year, and both were named for the same brief, foreign occupation.
Ottawa
The memorial this linden stands beside was built for one war and unveiled three months before the next one began.
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