The Manchurian Linden of Kissena Park

This linden is a leftover from a 19th century nursery business rather than a park planting, standing 75 feet north of a restroom next to Kissena Park's tennis courts on land that was once part of Samuel Bowne Parsons's commercial tree nursery. Parsons, whose family also planted Manhattan's Hangman's Elm-era Washington Square trees and much of Central Park's original stock, ran one of the era's most important import operations from this site starting in the 1870s, bringing Japanese maples to America for the first time and propagating rhododendrons at commercial scale. After Parsons died in 1906, the city absorbed part of his former grove into what became Kissena Park, and this Manchurian linden, a species native to forests spanning China, Korea and Russia's far east, is one of more than 100 imported tree varieties that trace back to the original nursery grounds still growing in the park today. It carries Great Tree status as a living fragment of Flushing's forgotten reputation as America's premier 19th century horticultural center, a history most visitors to the tennis courts beside it have no reason to suspect.