The Farm Cross Limes of Boezinge

Three limes at a farm gate in Boezinge are cut into candelabra, and somebody is still doing the cutting. Leiboom pruning means training a tree flat and holding it to a frame year after year; leave it a decade and the shape is gone for good. These three are being kept up, which is the fact worth the detour. They stand either side of a rustic concrete cross carrying a figure of Christ, at the hofgat, the gated entrance to a working farm on Ravestraat. Flanders' heritage inventory files them under two headings at once, welkomstboom, a tree planted to be seen by whoever is arriving, and kapelboom, a shrine tree, and both are right. This is a small roadside shrine using trees as its architecture. What nobody has recorded is anything else. No planting date, no girth, no age. The inventory describes the shape and the cross and stops there, which leaves this entry thin on history and unusually clear about what you actually see. You look from the road. Ravestraat is an ordinary public road and the trees and the cross stand at the farm's frontage; the yard past the gate is private and stays that way. If anyone knows when these three went in, we would like to hear it.