My Favorite Plants - Littleleaf Linden

When I was a little kid, there was what I thought of as a basswood tree on the boulevard of the house next door to mine. The tree didn't interest me much, not like the maple on my own house's boulevard, or the oaks around the corner. But the seeds--quarter inch, perfectly round, dark brown balls--fascinated me. Like little beads, they rolled into the cracks between sidewalk blocks and into the street's gutters, millions of them, apparently. I didn't think they were messy, I thought they were cool. The tree was messy because of the suckers the neighbors never pruned.

When I started working in the garden and landscape trade, and selling trees, I became aware of lindens as a tree that grew at approximately the same rate as maple, important for potential tree purchasers who already had six or seven maples and couldn't be talked into a Kentucky coffeetree or an oak, trees most people think their great-grandchildren might get to enjoy. I hadn't fallen in love with trees at that point. I liked trees, but I didn't know them very well, thinking of myself as a perennialist, which was actually my job title too.

So it came as an epiphany (one of the only true epiphanies like in James Joyce that I've ever experienced) when I realized that the lindens in ten gallon pots that I blathered about to customers were, a few years on, those wonderful emerald green trees with the spade-shaped canopes. Littleleaf lindens, that is. Not American lindens, the basswood of my childhood. American lindens are huge and sprawling trees while its more civilized cousin, the littleleaf or European linden, doesn't begin to sprawl until it is almost in old age.

Lindens also bloom, and when they do, they produce a marvelous aroma that I associate with early summer. The blooms attach to those round, bead-like seeds that I got such enjoyment from as a kid. Definitely millions of them. I don't mind sweeping any more than I mind weeding, so once all the seeds are down, sweep them up and go on with life. It's not like weeping willows that drop whips every day so you can never keep up with them. If you prune the suckers a couple times in the growing season, you have a beautiful and shapely tree suitable to even a small yard.