The Skoone Bastion Lindens

One of these lindens was already decades old when construction began on the bastion it now crowns. In 1999 a University of Tartu dendrochronologist cored the two thickest trunks in this row and counted roughly 390 and 300 growth rings, putting their planting near 1609 and 1699. The earlier date sits oddly early: the Skoone bastion's earthworks only went up after 1683. Nobody has resolved the gap. The tree does not need to; it simply kept growing while the fortification rose around it. The row itself first appears on a 1728 town plan, some nineteen or twenty lindens following the curve of the bastion's outer wall. An 1825 survey counted thirty-nine of them; only thirty-four had survived by the late 1920s. What remains still stands along the earthwork's crest above Rannamäe tee, in a park that has been a Victorian pleasure garden, a Soviet-era dance venue and the edge of a city stadium, and is today mostly just a park again. The trees have outlasted more than the buildings around them. In 2022 Postimees reported that roots from this same row were pushing apart the three-hundred-year-old stone passage buried in the bastion beneath it, an old fortress losing a slow argument with its own trees.