The Etagelinde of Westerlo

This lime was trained flat. Its crown grows as a disc rather than a dome, spread out and held up by a cast-iron framework designed by Pieter Jozef Taeymans, and Flanders protects only a handful of such etagelindes, trained tabletop limes, of which this is one. It has stood on Westerlo's Grote Markt since around 1630, on the site of a medieval market hall that burned down in the late 16th century, and a dairy market was traditionally held in its shade. The trunk measures 3.9 metres round and the disc-shaped canopy spans 18 metres, wide enough to shelter most of the old market square beneath it. Flanders protected it as landscape in 1951 and raised it to monument status in 1981, and Westerlo's own tourism office still points to it as a sight worth the detour rather than mere street furniture. Four centuries of pruning are the real craft on display here: nobody grows a tree into a flat disc by accident, and the ironwork holding the shape up has itself needed replacing once, in 1871. It stands free in the middle of town, no gate and no ticket, the easiest kind of remarkable tree there is to actually reach.