What is the oldest tree in Wessobrunn?
The oldest tree in Wessobrunn is the Tassilolinde, a large-leaved lime growing beside the wall of the former monastery. The German Dendrological Society dates it at 700 to 900 years, based on the structure of its stem. It is free to visit and signposted from every approach in the village, though visitors now view it from a marked walkway rather than standing directly beneath it.
The legend attached to this lime has an arithmetic problem. Duke Tassilo III is said to have slept beneath it in 753 and founded Kloster Wessobrunn on the strength of the dream. The duke is real and the monastery is real, but the tree is several centuries too young for either: the 700 to 900 year estimate is read from the stem rather than from any record, and the sleeping-under-the-tree part is treated as a later embellishment of the founding story rather than history. The trunk needs no legend to be remarkable: it measures about 14 metres round, the third-largest lime girth recorded in Bavaria after the Wolframslinde and the Kasberger Linde, under a crown roughly 27 metres across. One source wonders whether it was planted around a rebuilding of the abbey in the 1280s, but nobody has a documented planting date for it. Bavaria protected the tree as a Naturdenkmal in 1980, and in October 2023 it was made a Nationalerbe-Baum, a small and prestigious national heritage designation. The path beside it was rerouted to keep feet off the root plate, so visitors today see it from a few metres out rather than standing beneath the crown.
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