The Silver Lime of the Frater Paullussehof

The oldest tree standing in Tilburg is a lime, which in a town that may be named after a lime is a decent piece of luck, and it is not on the square where anyone would look for it. Silver lime is worth learning to recognise, because the trick is easy and it works from thirty metres. The underside of every leaf is coated in fine white felt, so on a windy day the whole crown flickers between deep green and pale silver as the leaves turn over. No other large lime does this. It has a second habit that is less charming. Silver lime flowers late, in July, and its nectar is famously hard on bumblebees; you sometimes find them stunned or dead under a big one in high summer. The mechanism has been argued over for decades and the current reading is that it is less about toxicity than about a starving late-season insect finding a huge, tempting, low-yield food source at the wrong moment. So: go in July for the scent, which is heavy and carries a long way down a street, and look at the ground while you are there.