The Lime of the Van Limburg Stirumlaan

Park a car under a lime in July and you learn not to do it twice. Limes carry aphid colonies all summer, and what the aphids do not keep of the sap comes back down as honeydew, a fine sticky rain that sets on anything below it. That is the standing complaint against the most planted avenue tree in the Netherlands, and this is one of the older ones. The register dates its planting to between 1880 and 1890, roughly 136 to 146 years, and files it as a Hollandse linde, the common lime. That tree is a hybrid of the small-leaved and large-leaved limes, and it rarely sets seed worth anything, so almost every one was raised from cuttings and layers. A Dutch lime avenue is closer to a row of copies than a row of siblings. It stands in Wilhelminapark near the Van Limburg Stirumlaan. The park opened in 1898, laid out in the loose English landscape manner that was fashionable then, and it now holds around two dozen trees under monumental protection, of which this is one. Beyond the register we found nothing written about this specimen at all, only about the ground it stands on. Which lime it is has not been recorded either. The tufts of hair in the vein angles on the underside of a leaf are what separate them. If you can read those, we want your verdict.