The Silver Lime of Biały Kamień

In a strong wind this tree changes colour. Silver lime carries a dense white felt on the underside of every leaf, so a gust turns a green crown pale in seconds, which is where the name comes from and how you tell it apart from the common limes lining half of Warsaw. It is not a Polish tree by origin. Tilia tomentosa grows wild in southeastern Europe and the Balkans and arrived here as a planting choice, valued for putting up with city air and for flowering late. Warsaw protected this one on 1 October 2013, three months after the pedunculate oak 85 metres up the same street, which makes this short stretch of ul. Bialy Kamien the unlikely holder of two natural monuments. The register gives it 20 metres of height and a trunk 274 centimetres round. No planting date exists anywhere for it. The trunk works out at a diameter near 87 centimetres, and silver lime is a reasonably fast grower, so a fair reading is somewhere between 90 and 150 years, which would have it standing well before the apartment blocks that surround it now and through the war that flattened most of what stood here then. Come in July. Silver lime flowers weeks after the common limes have finished, heavily scented, and the whole crown fills with bees.