TREE OF THE MONTH

Tilia Oliveri

July

The Chinese silver lime is my first choice among all its glorious family. This photo gives some impression of its profusion of flowers, among the earliest, along with our native small-leaved lime, to weigh like weariness upon the summer air.

In a lime tree beauty contest Tilia oliveri and our European weeping silver lime are the clear winners: the first a mound of green and cream and white, the second a tower of silver and green. The Chinese lime stands to one side of our temple of Pisces. Last night we took our wine down there before dinner and abandoned any attempt at tasting it. The scent of the lime tree eliminated all sense of taste or other smells. We couldn’t even smell the late Dutch honeysuckle that scrambles through a sea of buckthorn in this silvery corner of the garden.

Fifty yards away the small-leaved lime is flowering: daintier, with its little heart-shaped leaves and flowers that stand up perkily in their midst. The broad-leaved lime, Tilia platyphyllos, opened its first flowers a few days later this year, but I have never been able to determine a clearly-timed sequence. Tilia petiolaris, the soaring weeper, has yet to start, and the last will be the Chinese Tilia henryana with long-fringed leaves. Last year it was still perfuming the air in October.

Back to June's Tree of the Month