The Four-Trunked Linden of Bernardinai Garden

Four trunks leave the ground here as one tree, and Vilnius has protected the result since 1996 without ever writing down how old it is. It is a large-leaved lime, didžialapė liepa, and the two sources that list it cannot even agree on the adjective: keturkamienė in the municipal register, keturliemenė in the garden's own inventory. Both mean four-stemmed. Neither carries an age, a height or a girth, which for a designated heritage object is a striking amount of blank paper. Large-leaved lime flowers ahead of the small-leaved kind, in June, when the bees find it before you do. The rest of the year it is a shape: four heavy stems rising together, which is not how a lime looks in a textbook and is exactly how they often look in old gardens that have been cut back and left to recover more than once. The garden around it has been rebuilt repeatedly, most recently in a full restoration finished in 2012, so the ground at its feet is a good deal newer than the tree standing in it. If you know when it was planted, or have a tape measure and five minutes, we would like the numbers.