The Four-Trunked Linden of Bernardinai Garden

age unknownLarge-leaved Lime

Large-leaved LimeNobody has published a photograph of this tree under a licence we can use. Send us yours and it goes on this page.

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Which one is it? Four heavy stems leaving the ground together, a shape no lime has in a textbook.

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.

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The button above opens directions in your maps app. 10-15 min walk from Cathedral Square, same park as the oldest oak

Species: Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos)
Age estimate
Location: Bernardinai Garden (Sereikiškių Park) (Užupis / Old Town)
Access: Free, inside Bernardinai Garden (Sereikiškių Park), open daily
Getting there: 10-15 min walk from Cathedral Square, same park as the oldest oak

Trees nearby

The Three-Trunked Ash of Bernardinai Garden · 20 m away The Amur Cork Trees and Crimean Linden of Bernardinai Garden · 90 m away The Oldest Oak of Vilniusover 400 years · 170 m away

Curious what else is standing in Vilnius? See all 10 remarkable ancient trees in Vilnius or find out what the oldest tree in Vilnius is. It is a Large-leaved Lime; see every large-leaved lime on the site.

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This page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.

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