Qualla: Kaditz Lime Tree

Kaditz Lime Tree: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DynaMoToR, CC BY-SA 3.0. Look closely at the trunk and you can still find iron in it: rings and clips, nearly swallowed by bark now, that nobody put there for the tree's benefit. According to village tradition the great lime of Kaditz was the local pillory, and until the eighteenth century people convicted of something were chained to it where the congregation would have to walk past them. A description from 1836 records what the elders said their fathers had told them, and adds a detail that no human institution could have produced: the two half-circles of the iron collar had by then drifted about two ells apart. The tree had simply kept growing around the hardware, at its own speed, until the punishment no longer fitted anyone.

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Image: DynaMoToR | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kaditz Lime Tree: The Oldest Thing in Dresden

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jiuguang Wang, CC BY-SA 2.0. The large-leaved lime — *Tilia platyphyllos* — stands in the churchyard of the Emmaus Church in Kaditz, about six kilometres north-west of Dresden's historic centre, on a plateau ten metres above the normal level of the Elbe. It is roughly twenty metres tall and its trunk measure...

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Image: Jiuguang Wang | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kaditz Lime Tree: Fire, Twice

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephan M. Höhne, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1637, with the Thirty Years' War grinding through Saxony, the church burned. The lime came through almost untouched, and the church did not — it stood as a gutted shell until restoration began in 1650, and fragments of the older Lawrence chapel survive inside today's steeple. ...

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Image: Stephan M. Höhne | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kaditz Lime Tree: The Room Inside

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Appaloosa, CC BY-SA 3.0. The trunk had been hollow before the fire, but sealed. The flames opened it, and when a heavy bough later rotted and tore away, the cavity widened into something people could walk into. For a while they did exactly that, setting up a table and chairs inside the tree; young people...

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Image: Appaloosa | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kaditz Lime Tree: Twenty-One Ells

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paulae, CC BY-SA 3.0. Nineteenth-century Saxony was faintly obsessed with measuring this tree, and could not agree on a number. *Sachsens Kirchen-Galerie* gave the girth as 19¾ ells in 1836 and compared it favourably with the famous lime at Augustusburg. The journal *Saxonia* made it 21 ells in 1839, ...

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Image: Paulae | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kaditz Lime Tree: Weddings and High Water

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carl Wilhelm Arldt (*19.1.1809 Nieder-Ruppersdorf bei Herrnhut/Oberlausitz; †27.10.1868 Löbtau bei Dresden), nach F. Fleischmann, Public domain. In 1945 a resident of Kaditz is said to have slept inside the hollow trunk to avoid the house-to-house searches of the first postwar weeks. Around 1960 the very old graves at the roots were cleared. A decade later the pastor Karl-Heinz Scharf, who had made the tree's history his ...

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Image: Carl Wilhelm Arldt (*19.1.1809 Nieder-Ruppersdorf bei Herrnhut/Oberlausitz; †27.10.1868 Löbtau bei Dresden), nach F. Fleischmann | Public domain