Buds of linden, June 5, 2018
It’s mid June and here in Cardiff the weather is living up to its summer promise, with many scorching-hot sunny days. But there is still a cooling north-easterly wind most days as I walk beside the Wharf (old Bute East Dock). And all at once the linden tree (Tilia) I am following is full of green flower buds.
Actually I thought they were the fruits, but as this tree seems to be running later than others I have seen, the flower buds have yet to open and the fruits will come later. I hope so, or else I have completely missed them!
To paraphrase Wikipedia, the small yellow-green hermaphrodite flowers of Tilia cordata are produced in clusters of five to 11 in early summer with a leafy yellow-green subtending bract and have a rich, heavy scent; the trees are much visited by bees to the erect flowers, held above the bract; this arrangement is different from that of the common lime Tilia × europaea where the flowers are held beneath the bract.
This would mean all the other lindens I have seen about the city are Tilia × europaea, or in some cases the large-leaved lime Tilia platyphyllos, with its big, pale-backed leaves and again drooping flowers.
Approaching the linden from the south-east…
I was a bit shy because there was a fisherman nearby with his trolley and cup of coffee under the tree
As described earlier, the flowers do seem to be held above the bract, while most lindens I see have them hanging down below
Only when I looked closer at the pictures I had taken did I notice the small red lumps on the leaves…
A closer look – these are lime nail galls or bugle galls
According to Wikipedia the mite Eriophyes tiliae forms the chemically induced galls on leaves of Tilia × europaea. So why are they on a Tilia cordata, if this is one of those?
I took this picture of longer nail galls on a linden close to the bus stop in 2011
Back in 2011 I wrote a blog post about my confusion over lime/linden tree species (see here). Annoyingly I am still confused. There are so many species, crosses and cultivars.
From the north-west side the linden has a conical top
My linden is bare at the bottom but the tree next door shows characteristic sprouts from the base
iPhone picture if the leaves and flower buds on May 31…
…on that visit I thought I noticed a lighter dappling of some of the leaves, which wasn’t sunlight but a definite difference in pigmentation
On that earlier visit I also noticed the piece of string around a branch was still there
Bluer skies behind the linden on May 31 – and no fisherman
Hopefully by July I will have caught sight of the flowers…
Hope the string will snap off, before it strangles the branch.
We have Tillia here, too, but I am at a loss to know which they are; also I have never managed to find any scent from them which is very sad.