The Amur Cork Trees and Crimean Linden of Bernardinai Garden

You can press a thumb into the bark of an Amur cork tree. It is thick, spongy and cut with deep fissures, closer to a layer of insulation than to a skin, and it is the reason to come and put a hand on it. Two of them stand in Bernardinų sodas beside a Crimean linden, and Vilnius designated the three together in 1996 as one heritage object, a group rather than three trees. Phellodendron amurense comes from the Amur river basin, Manchuria and Korea, where the winters are harder than anything Vilnius produces, which is why it is comfortable in a Baltic park. It carries clusters of small black fruit in autumn. The Crimean linden beside them, Tilia x euchlora, is a hybrid lime with glossy dark leaves that European cities have planted along streets for well over a century. The group sits inside the same short loop as the rest of the garden's protected trees: the nine-trunked willow, the four-trunked lime, the multi-stemmed ash, and the oldest oak in the city at the southern end. The documentation is thin, and worth saying plainly. No age, girth or height has ever been published for any of the three, and the only real record is the city's own designation, which is what the later listings repeat. The pin puts you in the right part of the garden rather than at a particular trunk, so use the bark: nothing else growing here feels like it.