Tilia cordata Seeds | Small-leaved Lime

Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) seed — Small-leaved Lime (*Tilia cordata*): native to Europe from southern Britain and northern France east to the Urals and the Caucasus, and north to southern Scandinavia; in Britain native chiefly to limestone country in the north and west.

LATIN NAME: Tilia cordata

COMMON NAME: Small-leaved Lime

Plant Profile

Tilia cordata is a large, long-lived tree with a rounded crown and a trunk that becomes deeply fluted with age. The leaves are heart-shaped, 4 to 8 cm long, with a finely toothed margin and a cordate base, and they are smaller and glossier than those of the large-leaved lime. The rusty axillary tufts are consistent enough to be used in keys.

The flowers hang in clusters of five to ten, each carried on a stalk fused for part of its length to a pale, elongated bract. Creamy yellow petals sit above five sepals that fall early, and the numerous stamens surround a single style.

The bract is the tree’s dispersal device. It stays attached to the cluster after flowering, and when the small, hard fruits ripen the whole unit detaches as one piece. The bract acts as a sail, twisting the falling cluster away from the parent, so that the seed travels on the wind rather than dropping into the shade of the crown.

Lime takes clipping better than almost any other large European tree, which is why it is pleached into the flat walls and raised hedges that frame so many formal gardens. In a street or a square it is asked for a different quality: a clean trunk, a regular crown and a tolerance of compacted soil and hard pruning.

Lime wood is soft, even and close-grained, with almost no figure, and that neutrality is exactly what a carver wants. It cuts cleanly in every direction, holds fine detail without splitting, and has been the timber of English church carving since the seventeenth century.

Science & Biotechnology

The flowers and their bracts contain flavonol glycosides, most famously tiliroside, a kaempferol derivative named after the genus, alongside astragalin and quercetin glycosides. An infusion of the dried flower clusters is the classic European linden tea; the bract goes into the pot with the flowers, because it carries the same compounds.

Named limes do not come true from seed, and they do not root readily from cuttings either. Nursery practice is to graft or bud the chosen clone onto seedling rootstock, usually of the same species, and to grow the tree on for several seasons before lifting. Seed remains the cheap route for hedging and for bulk planting.

Uses & Benefits

Lime flowers are a rich nectar source and one of the reasons beekeepers value the genus, but the sticky film that appears on cars and pavements under a lime in high summer is not nectar. It is honeydew, excreted by the lime aphid as it feeds in the crown.

Pollen records show lime as a major component of European forests in the middle of the present interglacial, and it was the decline of those forests that removed it from most of the British landscape. The lime was also planted deliberately: village limes stood at meeting places and boundaries across central Europe.

Under the outer bark lies a layer of bast fibre that strips in long, tough ribbons. Soaked in water until the soft tissue rots away, the fibre yields rope, netting and matting, and it was the material of coarse clothing and basket-like footwear in parts of eastern Europe. The trade in lime bast died out with cheap jute, but the fibre is still worked by hand in a few places.

Growing from Seed

Lime seed carries both a hard coat and a dormant embryo, so a single cold spell is not enough. Give it a warm, moist spell first, then a cold, moist winter, either by sowing in a frame in autumn and leaving the pan outside or by moving damp seed through the two phases in bags. Sow 1 cm deep in a gritty loam, prick the seedlings out when they show two true leaves, and line them out at 30 cm.

Lift and transplant the young trees once they stand about 1.5 m tall, moving bare-root stock in the dormant season and staking firmly. Space avenue trees 8 to 12 m apart and hedge plants 45 cm apart. Watch for the lime aphid and for the nail galls raised by the gall mite on the upper leaf surface; neither kills a tree, but both disfigure it.

Our Take

A lime is a lifetime decision, so plant it where the crown will have room. If you are choosing between the limes, the large-leaved lime is the bigger, earlier-flowering tree and the silver lime takes dry, exposed ground far better, while Miquel’s lime suits a smaller garden.

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