The Dike Lime of Tull en 't Waal

Boatmen on the Lek used to steer by this lime. A bakenboom, a beacon tree: one big tree on an otherwise bare dike is visible for kilometres from the water and fixes a bend of river that looks the same all the way along. It was pollarded to do the job, cut off at over three metres so it would throw up a dense head of shoots instead of spreading. What stands there now is what happens when the pollarding stops. Twenty metres of crown have grown up out of the old cuts, on a trunk that was never shaped to carry it. In 1943 an artillery shell hit the tree. It recovered well, which is the thing lime does better than almost anything else planted in this country: cut it, burn it or shell it and it comes back from whatever is left. That is why so many of the oldest trees in Dutch villages are limes rather than something more glamorous. The Lekdijk is a working flood defence with a public path along the top, so you reach the tree along the same line the boatmen were reading it from, one side further in. At 225 to 275 years old it was already a landmark long before the shell found it.