Large-leaved lime

Family

Malvaceae

Habit

Tree

Height

35 m

Spread

12 m

Growth

medium

Lifespan

500 years

First yield

after 20 years

Hardiness

zone 4–6

Shade tolerance

partial shade

Soil

Sand, Silt, Loam

Soil moisture

semi-dry – very moist

pH

6 – 8

Edible: The young, soft leaves of large-leaved lime are edible raw from bud break until about the end of May. They taste mild, faintly sweet and slightly mucilaginous and work as a salad base, a sandwich filling or a thickening addition to soup; with age they turn tough and tannic. The sheer quantity is unusual: a single old lime yields more leaf vegetable in spring than an entire vegetable bed, which is why the forest garden movement values it as a leaf tree. The flowers, appearing in June, are dried together with their wing-like bract and made into tea, syrup or cordial; they are strongly scented and taste of honey. Harvest in dry weather shortly after opening, as scent and potency fade quickly.

Other uses: Lime is the classic carving timber of central Europe: evenly soft, fine-grained, pale and almost without grain direction, so it cuts cleanly every way and barely splits. The great late-Gothic altarpieces of Tilman Riemenschneider and Veit Stoss are worked from it, as is carcass wood for furniture and patterns for metal casting. The inner bark yields bast, which was retted and stripped into rope, mats, baskets and tying material; into the 19th century this was a trade in its own right. Thin twigs are charred into artists' drawing charcoal. For beekeepers large-leaved lime ranks among the richest tree flows of all, and a single mature tree can deliver around 0.8 kilograms of honey.

Site: Large-leaved lime reaches 30 to 35 metres and spreads just as wide; it is a tree for farmyards, meadows and avenues, not for a small garden. What matters most is clearance below it: in June and July lime aphids feed on the leaves and rain honeydew down, coating cars, terrace furniture, paving and laundry in a sticky film that sooty mould then blackens. Nothing that has to stay clean belongs underneath. Late frosts damage the early flush, so a frost hollow without cold-air drainage is a poor choice. In return the bloom is one of the best bee pastures in central Europe and makes the tree the centre of the garden in June. Care: Stake for the first few years and water deeply in drought; the root zone will not tolerate lasting compaction from vehicles or added fill. Few trees take pruning as well as lime, which resprouts even from heavy old wood, and that is what dancing limes, apostle limes and the espaliered house limes of northern Germany are built on. If you want to reduce it, do so in late winter and decisively rather than a little at a time, or you get dense broom-like crowns. Remove root suckers at the base regularly, otherwise the trunk zone scrubs over. Old limes go hollow, form internal roots and rejuvenate themselves; still, check deadwood over paths and seating.

Lime seed is stubbornly dormant: the nutlets have a hard, water-impermeable coat and a deeply dormant embryo, so in the wild they often emerge only in the second or third spring. If you sow, harvest the fruit green before it fully lignifies and put it straight into an outdoor seedbed; otherwise it needs warm-then-cold stratification over several months. The vegetative routes are easier and standard in horticulture: layers root reliably over one to two years, and root suckers and stool shoots can be severed and grown on. Selected forms such as 'Laciniata' or 'Aurea' are grafted onto seedling rootstocks. Hardwood cuttings succeed only under mist and with rooting hormone.

Large-leaved lime flowers in June, making it the earliest native lime. It fills precisely the gap between the spring and summer honey flows, which is what makes it so valuable to beekeepers. Its nectar rating is the highest possible: a single flower can release up to 7.7 milligrams of sugar a day. Pollen value, by contrast, is low, and only one wild bee species specialises on it. The tree's greatest contribution is as larval food: around 71 caterpillar species feed on it, eleven of them exclusively on Tilia, and five beetle species are added to that. The lime looper even develops inside the flowers themselves, eating stigmas, stamens and petals. Old limes go hollow and then host nuthatch, coal tit, great spotted woodpecker, jay and chaffinch: the structural value of a veteran tree far exceeds that of a young one.

Notable: village, dancing and court lime → the centre of assembly, festival and justice; tree of Freyja, goddess of love; heart-shaped leaf read as a love symbol; German "lind" for mild+gentle derives from it; apostle limes trained with horizontal branches; lives up to 1000 years; German Tree of the Year 1991, Medicinal Plant of the Year 2025.

Central and southern Europe. Large-leaved lime ranges from northern Spain and central Italy through France, Germany and the Alps to Ukraine and the Balkans; it is largely absent from northern Europe and the western lowlands. Wild stands are rare and mostly confined to slopes in the uplands and the limestone Alps. Its populations have been declining for some two thousand years, pushed out of the forests by clearance, wood pasture and the promotion of beech. In the northern Alps it usually climbs to 1000 metres, higher in the southern Alps, and to 1450 metres in the Allgäu Alps. As a village, park and avenue tree it has been planted far beyond its natural range and is therefore far commoner than forest statistics suggest.

Large-leaved lime is a tree of scree slopes and ravine forests and a character species of the Tilio-Acerion alliance. It occupies steep, blocky slopes with seepage-moist, base-rich, well-aerated soils, often over limestone or basalt, alongside sycamore, wych elm and ash. Such ground is too steep and too unstable for beech, and that is exactly where lime holds its own against it. Indicator values place it on moderately moist, shaded, neutral to basic and moderately nutrient-rich sites of the colline to submontane belt. It is sensitive to late frost but more robust against summer drought and soil compaction than small-leaved lime.