The Vitifolia Linden (east of the pair)

Ottawa's register of remarkable trees lists exactly two vine-leaved limes in the city, and this is the eastern one. Its twin stands thirty-five metres away across the grass. The cultivar carries the name Vitifolia because the leaves are cut like a grape's, big and coarse and nothing like the neat heart-shaped leaf most people picture on a lime. In the last week of June the crown hums: limes flower late, the scent carries, and every bee in the park works the tree at once. The dating comes from a single source, the National Capital Commission's register, which says both trees were likely raised in the Central Experimental Farm nursery around 1897 and planted here in or around 1900. Roughly 125 years, then, with the register's own likely and its in-or-around left in place, because no second document names either tree. What that decade explains is why they are here at all. Ottawa spent the years around 1900 deliberately rebuilding its own appearance, and ornamental stock from the government farm was the cheapest way to do it. Major's Hill Park sits on the bluff above the canal locks with Parliament Hill directly opposite, which made it the first place the effort showed. Stand between the two limes and you are standing in the result.