Be a bee. A busy buzzing bee. If I were a bee, I’d be here.
Recently, during the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, I spent part of a sunny afternoon wandering around Marion Square downtown. It was a really fun experience. There were lots of shops selling local Warhol and Picasso masterpieces, lots of produce stalls (the market was lively), and lots of delicious food.
It’s a lovely place for a walk or a wander – there are lots of well behaved dogs, some well behaved children too, and of course the botanist in each of us has to look at the plants.
This is a small tree planted in Marion Square. It is one of about 40 species of plants in the same genus, most of which are found in Asia, Europe and North America. There are many native species in the eastern U.S., but they don’t seem to have spread as far west.
The various species around the world, especially those in North America, are often very difficult to distinguish as different species, and there is ongoing botanical debate as to whether they can actually be distinguished at all. This problem is exacerbated by the widespread hybridization that is known to occur in many of these species, and of course the hybrids are often quite intermediate to the parent species in various characters.
This is one of those groups of plants where the concept of “species” is really a bit of a stretch; groups like this might be better thought of not as separate species, but as composites of growth forms all within the same genus. But as I said, there is a fair bit of academic controversy on the subject. So, back to the fun stuff.
These various species and hybrids are deciduous trees with mostly dark green leaf blades, sometimes white or silvery on the underside. The leaf blades are heart-shaped and stalked. They tend to have dense crowns, which are great for providing shade.
You know the wide streets of Berlin.Unter den Linden“There are many of these trees planted in Germany and other parts of Europe, and they are often found in beer gardens, along with the ubiquitous horse chestnut. To be botanically honest, our mystery trees (linden, Tilia cordata) is truly a hybrid.
These various species and hybrids have been valued for medicinal purposes for centuries, with the flowers and stem bark being used to make a variety of tonics, gargles, teas and tinctures, and various extracts are still used today as cough medicines.
The flowers have a pleasant fragrance. They grow in clusters at the end of thin stalks attached to thin bracts. The flowers have five pale yellow or white petals and many stamens. If you stand under the lower branches, the wonderful scent will fill the air and make you feel really good.
So what are the bees thinking? After all, the flowers are loaded with pollen and sweet nectar, so it’s no surprise that this is one of the best bee trees in the world (LOL).
John Nelson is the former Curator of the Herbarium at the University of South Carolina School of Biological Sciences. As a public service, the Herbarium offers free plant identification services. For more information, please call 803-777-8175 or email [email protected].
This article originally appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat. The fragrant flowers of the linden tree are a medicinal tonic
