The Liberty Tree of Voormezele

A slab of white marble at the foot of this lime reads Vryheidsboom 1918-1968, and that inscription is the only thing dating the tree. The village set the plaque in 1968, fifty years after the armistice, and the 1918 names the year the tree belongs to rather than a day anybody wrote down. So call it roughly 105 years and leave the number loose, because no source will do better. It stands in the churchyard of Onze-Lieve-Vrouwkerk in Voormezele, a village four kilometres southwest of Ieper, among a small crowd of things marking the same few years: a British war grave, memorial stones for the civilian and military dead, a Japanese peace pole nearby. Planting a liberty tree is an old European habit, marking a political turn with something living instead of another block of stone. It is worth being plain about what this tree is, because in this landscape the assumption runs the other way. It did not survive the war. The church behind it was rebuilt afterwards like everything else here, and the lime went into ground the shelling had already cleared. That is exactly what makes it the oldest tree in Ypres: it starts at the moment the shelling stopped. If you have stood under it lately, tell us how it is doing.