The Bernhardskirche Linden

The church was already three centuries old before anyone planted the tree in front of it. Rohracker's Bernhardskirche was built after 1447. The parish's own history says the lime in its garden went in around 1870, which makes it about 150 years old and comfortably the younger of the pair. Stuttgart designated it a natural monument in 2003 and gave two reasons: its character, and the animals living in it. The register is a little confused about the tree and carries it twice, under two numbers at identical coordinates. The city's own ordinance settles it by naming exactly one lime at Rohrackerstraße 257, so this is one tree with two entries rather than two trees. What it has witnessed is not a battle or a duke, and that is rather the point. It has stood through the whole of modern Germany in a working village churchyard on Stuttgart's eastern slopes, doing the job churchyard trees have always had: making a patch of shade people sit in. The parish still describes its garden exactly that way, as somewhere to linger, with this lime as the reason it works. Come in the last week of June or the first of July. Small-leaved limes flower then, the scent carries across the whole garden, and the crown fills with enough bees to hear from the bench underneath.