The linden was also a tree of love and of the goddess: in Germanic tradition it was associated with Freya and with tender affection, and lovers met and plighted troth beneath it, so that it became the tree of romance in folk song. Ovid gives it a gentle myth: the aged and devoted Baucis, who with her husband Philemon alone showed hospitality to the disguised gods, was granted at death to be transformed with him into two trees growing from one trunk, she into a linden and he into an oak, so that they might never be parted. Community, justice, truth, peace and faithful love all gather to the fragrant, bee-loved tree at the heart of the old European village.
The old custom of gathering under the village linden survives in name if not in function in one of Europe's most famous streets, Unter den Linden in Berlin, literally under the linden trees, a grand avenue first planted with lime trees in the seventeenth century that has remained one of the city's central boulevards ever since, a small but very visible trace of the tree's old communal role surviving into modern urban planning. Similar linden-lined market squares and avenues, often still called the Lindenplatz or an equivalent name, remain common across German, Austrian and Czech towns today, a living architectural echo of the same tree once trusted to witness a fair judgement.