Linden

The linden or lime, Tilia, is a broad, long-lived, sweet-scented tree much planted in the towns and villages of central and northern Europe. Among the Germanic and Slavic peoples it was the tree of the community: the village linden stood at the centre of the settlement, and beneath it the people gathered to dance, to celebrate and above all to hold court and pronounce judgement, so that justice was said to be given under the lime. It was held to be a tree of truth, under which no falsehood could stand, and of peace.

Linden flowers remain a popular calming herbal tea today, tilleul in France and Lindenbluetentee in Germany, brewed commercially and at home much as it was in earlier centuries, one of relatively few old European nervine herbs to have kept an entirely mainstream, everyday place in modern life rather than being pushed to the margins of alternative medicine. The tree is also one of the most important honey plants of the European summer, its abundant nectar-rich blossom yielding a distinctively flavoured linden honey still sought after by beekeepers and honey connoisseurs, a further practical value layered onto its old reputation as the tree of the village green.

Linden wood, pale, soft and very easy to carve, was also the preferred timber of European wood-carvers and sculptors for centuries, prized above all by the German master carver Tilman Riemenschneider for the fine detail it allowed, so that the same tree valued for shade, honey and calming tea also gave the continent much of its finest religious wood sculpture.

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.