The Turn-of-the-Century Linden of Dow's Lake

The register's entry for this tree is mostly about medicine. Large-leaved lime supplies Western pharmacology, homeopathy and herbal medicine with its flowers and its sapwood, mother tinctures included, and that is what the National Capital Commission chose to record about this specimen instead of its size. You can see why once the flowers arrive. They open in late June, pale yellow-white, hanging in small clusters from a papery green bract that afterwards works as a wing and carries the seed away from the tree. They smell of honey from several metres off, and for a fortnight the crown is loud with bees. Dried, the same flowers are the tilleul sold in every French supermarket. The register puts the planting at the turn of the twentieth century, along a driveway independently documented as built between 1900 and 1905, which fits, though that source does not name this tree. One detail for anyone who has already walked Ottawa's other limes. This is the straight species, Tilia platyphyllos, not the cut-leaved cultivar of the pair standing in Major's Hill Park. Same genus, bigger and softer leaf, hairy underneath, and the earliest of the limes to flower, which means it goes over while the others are still in bud. Nobody has put a tape around this one either. The path is free and the road beside it belongs to walkers at weekends.