The Peace Tree of Vlamertinge

The peace tree on this square is not the peace tree. The original went in on 30 November 1919, behind the wayside cross on the Sixplein in front of Vlamertinge's town hall, and what grows in its place today is a young lime of no recorded age. The 1919 planting is documented twice, which is more than most things around here manage. Flanders' heritage inventory records it, citing the newspaper De Poperinghenaar of 7 December 1919, a week after the event, and the municipal heritage trail records it separately. It was a village gesture rather than a state one: a vredesboom, a peace tree, marking Belgium's liberation, put in behind the calvary where the whole village walked past it. At some point the first tree went. The inventory says only that the one standing now was planted comparatively recently, in the same spot, behind the same cross, and gives no date at all for the replanting. So the age here belongs to the place and not to the wood, and the honest description is a young lime holding a spot a village chose in 1919. If you know when the replacement went in, or remember the tree before it, that is exactly the sort of thing we would like to be told.