Marienlinde Telgte

Telgte's pilgrims used to take a leaf of this lime home with them, and in the seventeenth century that habit is reckoned to have cost the tree some 150,000 leaves a year. They came for the Gnadenbild, the devotional image at the heart of the pilgrimage, which local tradition says was carved from this tree's own wood. The Marienlinde stands at the Munstertor, the northern town gate, and is the last of three lindens that once grew there. Telgte calls it the Dicke Linde, the fat lime. Nobody has dated it properly. German Wikipedia gives a presumed 750 years, the Baumkunde register a planting year of 1328, which is nearer 700, and neither figure is documented. The trunk measures 6.53 metres round, though that describes what survived rather than what grew: the register notes a former circumference of as much as 9 metres, and what stands today is a remaining section of trunk with a crown regrown around it. An assessment in 2019 found it vital. It is protected twice over, as a Naturdenkmal and as a Baumveteran, and it stands in the open where anyone can walk up to it at any hour. Three grew at this gate. One is left.