The 2,000-year-old lime of Silk Wood

Every twenty years Westonbirt cuts this tree to the ground, and that is how it has stayed alive. The small-leaved lime in Silk Wood is not one trunk but a ring of about 60 stems, all rising from a single ancient stool. Forestry England, which owns the arboretum, calls it the 2,000-year-old lime and describes the original tree as thought to be hundreds, possibly thousands, of years old. Nobody has dated it. The 2,000 is an estimate repeated by the owner and the Friends of Westonbirt, not a measurement, so read it as a tradition with a good argument behind it. The argument is the axe. Left alone, a small-leaved lime usually lives about 500 years, the Friends say. Cut back to its base, it sends up fresh stems from the old roots, and continuous coppicing is their explanation for why this one has outlived that span. Coppicing in Silk Wood is recorded as far back as 1292, so the practice that keeps this tree going has more than seven centuries on the record in this wood alone. The last harvest came in November 2012, and the poles were built into a sculpture by Richard Harris. On a twenty-year rotation, the next cut falls around 2032. Come expecting a thicket rather than a tower. What looks like a clump of young poles is the visible top of something very old.