The Small-Leaved Lime

Tilia cordata, the Small-Leaved Lime, is Britain's only native lime, and in the wild it all but disappears once you travel north of the Midlands, which makes the twenty-five metre example growing in York Museum Gardens an outlier by geography alone before it even earned its Tree Register title. Its trunk measures nearly three metres round, tall and arrow-straight in a garden of stranger, more contorted specimens, and that unusually columnar shape, rather than any historical event, is what put it among the ten-acre garden's six Yorkshire county champions. Small-leaved limes can live for centuries in the wild, some of England's oldest documented trees among them, but the Tree Register's estimate for this specimen sits within the 80 to 150 year range shared by the garden's whole set of champions, planted out after the Yorkshire Philosophical Society began filling the grounds around the ruined St Mary's Abbey in the nineteenth century. Its bright green leaves, heart-shaped and small enough to look almost dainty against its height, turn a clean yellow every autumn. A native tree standing this far outside where its wild relatives usually grow is itself the whole story.