The Windom Park Basswood

The largest American basswood recorded in Minnesota is standing in an ordinary neighbourhood park in Northeast Minneapolis, hanging out over a slope behind the park building, with nothing there to tell you so. The Minneapolis Parks Foundation and Mpls.St.Paul Magazine both name it the state champion of its species, and both note the Park Board's Heritage Tree designation. Neither prints a height or a circumference, which is a strange gap for a tree whose entire claim is size. Basswood is the American lime, and for a fortnight around the turn of June into July it does something an oak never will. The flowers are small, pale and hanging, the scent carries the width of a park, and bees work a tree this size hard enough that you hear it before you reach it. Beekeepers here set their year by the basswood flow. The rest of the year it is a broad, heart-leaved shade tree, which is what basswoods were planted for along American streets by the thousand. Nobody has dated it, and champion status is about size rather than years: basswood grows quickly, so a big one need not be an old one. You will find it southwest of the park building on NE Hayes Street, leaning out over the hillside. If anyone has the measurements, we would like them.