From a distance, the common lime trees are a rich orangey colour. This looks wrong. The autumn leaves of these trees are buttery and the last of them blew down a month ago. The limes have a curious russet foliage, just like the coating of rust on the fallen leaves in a spring issuing from ironstone under the Short Woods a few miles north of here. The rusty limes look oddly out of time, as if frozen in an arrested autumn when all about them winter trees stand darkly naked.
On a closer look, the limes are not still holding leaves at all but are full of bracts and seeds. The bracts are small, oblong, modified leaves, pale and almost transparent when they open in spring, like solar panels on a satellite above the dangling cyme of two to seven flowers.
The flowers are hermaphrodites and honey-scented, drawing swarms of bees in June. Once pollinated, the flowers produce seeds as little furry grey nutlets, slightly grooved, with a pointy end. When they detach, the bracts become propellers, spiralling the seeds down to earth like some kind of steampunk device. Except these haven’t. Holding on to their bracts and seeds, long after the leaves have gone, has changed their character as the iron trees catch the winter light.
Common or European lime, Tilia x europaea is a hybrid between the small-leaved lime, T cordata, and the large-leaved lime, T platyphyllos. Both parent species grow on Wenlock Edge and, although there are naturally occurring hybrids, these rusty ones are cultivated varieties planted about a century ago.
The common limes are masting – having a year of super-abundant seed bearing. Some think this is a strategy of proliferation by setting the most seed in years of fewest predators. Others see it as a response to the weather. Whatever the reason, it’s all in vain. These seeds will never break their dormancy, never germinate, never be a lime forest in waiting. Until they fall to the hungry ground, these hopeless satellites on iron wings dream on.
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