The Lime of the Schönbornpark

Vienna's tree registry lists nearly nine hundred trees in the eighth district and gives this one a girth of 489 centimetres, which makes it comfortably the thickest thing growing in Josefstadt. The lime stands beside the pond in Schönbornpark, the garden of the Palais Schönborn, and the city dates its planting to 1839. That is twenty-three years before the Schönborn family sold the grounds to the municipality and the private garden became a public park, so the tree spent its first two decades behind a wall, in a palace garden nobody was allowed into. The palace itself, built between 1706 and 1711 to a design by Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt, has housed the Volkskundemuseum since 1917, which means the lime now shades a lawn where people eat lunch between looking at Austrian farmhouse furniture. At 26 to 30 metres it is taller than the palace behind it. Large-leaved limes flower earlier than the small-leaved kind, usually the middle two weeks of June, and when this one goes off the whole park smells of it and the crown audibly hums. Bring something to sit on. The benches around the pond fill up fast on the first properly warm evening of the year, and locals know exactly which fortnight to come for.