Lime trees have nothing to do with limes, but everything to do with carving
The lime trees lining English avenues are no relation to the citrus fruit. Their soft, nearly grainless wood filled German altarpieces and puppet workshops, their inner bark clothed Bronze Age Britons, and in Russian the word for linden-made means forged, because counterfeit seals were once cut from it.
Tilia is a genus of about 30 species spread across the temperate Northern Hemisphere, most diverse in Asia. Britons call it lime, Americans linden or basswood. The English lime is a corruption of Middle English lind, linked to a Latin word for flexible, while basswood comes from bast, the fibrous inner bark. Many species hybridise freely, so the exact count is uncertain. Most are large deciduous trees of 20 to 40 metres, with lopsided heart-shaped leaves and tiny fruit dangling from a ribbon-like bract that helps the wind carry the seeds a little way from the parent.
The timber, light at about 560 kilograms per cubic metre, is ideal for fine work. Germanic tribes built shields from it; in Germany it became the standard medium for sculpture from the Middle Ages, used by Tilman Riemenschneider among others, and in England Grinling Gibbons favoured it. It remains a staple for marionettes, and its acoustic qualities suit guitar bodies, recorders and drum shells. The bast, soaked for a month until its fibres separate, has made Ainu garments in Japan and Manchu ropes and fishing nets in north-east China.
The flowers are strongly scented and draw bees, producing a pale, full-flavoured honey. In north-east China, Tilia honey is prized as white or snow honey. The nectar holds a compound that bumblebee guts convert into a substance active against Crithidia bombi, a debilitating parasite, which may help bees cope with disease. Aphids feast on the sap, and ants farm them for honeydew, which is why cars parked beneath lindens end up sticky.
Avenues of limes were fashionable in English landscape gardens in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, following Continental habits of planting them in rows for shade. The walk at Hatfield House went in between 1700 and 1730. Growing new trees from seed is tricky: dried seeds fall into deep dormancy and need 18 months to sprout.
Source: Tilia
