The sun had barely risen above the roof tops and already the flowers on the common limes beside Waskerley beck filled the air with a fragrance that hinted of lily of the valley. Standing underneath, I could hear a low-pitched hum, the sound of countless bees, wasps, flies and hoverflies feeding on their nectar. In late July, when they are in full bloom, lime trees, also known as lindens, can be identified with eyes closed: just take a deep breath and listen.
It’s not only insects that find lime blossom palatable. In his journal entry for 25 July 1790 the parson-naturalist Gilbert White, learning that the French found lime blossom tea soothing for coughs, hoarseness and fever, described making his own brew and finding it to be “soft, well flavoured, pleasant, saccharine julep, in taste much resembling the juice of liquorice”.
Only the appearance of common lime, Tilia x europaea, a hybrid between large-leaved and small-leaved limes, is a sensory disappointment. Ugly burrs on the lower trunk produce an unruly shrubbery of sprouts and suckers that need to be hacked back annually. These cuttings root so easily that vast numbers of the hybrid, rather than its better-looking parent species, have been propagated for urban roadside planting, destined to be brutally butchered and eventually pollarded when their fast-growing, upright limbs outgrow their urban confinement.
Five minutes’ walk from the Waskerley beck’s hybrid limes, beside the parish church of St Mary and St Stephen, there is a magnificent, ancient specimen of the parental small-leaved lime dominating the churchyard. Tilia cordata is a rare native tree in Durham, at the limit of its natural climate range, setting viable seed only in the longest, hottest summers.
Today it was flowering to perfection, tassels of flowers held above the foliage, giving its domed crown a golden glow. Here, among the tombstones, it has had time and space to live life to the full, to realise its natural size and shape, protected from browsing animals so that the tips of its arching limbs almost touch the ground. Few trees are so fortunate.
The perfect place to sit, in fragrant, cool shade, while bees worked in its canopy overhead, on what turned out to be the hottest July day on record.
