THE AMERICAN LINDEN OR BASSWOOD.
Tilia Americana, Linn.
The American linden or basswood is a stately spreading tree reaching one hundred and twenty feet in height and a trunk diameter of four feet. The bark is brown, furrowed, and scaly, the branches gray and smooth, the twigs ruddy. The alternate leaves are obliquely heart-shaped, saw toothed, with prominent veins that branch at the base, only on the side next to the petiole. (See illustration, page 86.) Occasionally the leaf blades are eight inches long. A dense shade is cast by a linden tree in midsum mer.
The blossoms, cream-white and clustered on pale green, leaf-like blades, open by hundreds in June and July, actually dripping with nectar, and illuminating the plat forms of green leaves. A bird flying overhead looks down upon a tree covered with broad leaf blades overlapping like shingles on a roof. It must look underneath to see the flowers that delight us as we look up into the tree-top from our station on the ground.
In midsummer the linden foliage becomes coarse and wind-whipped; the soft leaf-substance is attacked by insects that feed upon it; plant lice deface them with patches of honey-dew, and the sticky surfaces catch dust and soot. Riddled and torn, they drop in desultory
fashion, their faded yellow not at all like the satisfying gold of beech and hickory leaves.
The flight of basswood seeds on their wing-like blades goes on throughout the winter. This alone would account for the fact that basswoods greatly outnumbered all other trees in the virgin forests of the Ohio Valley. The seeds are not the tree's sole dependence. Suckers grow up about the stump of a tree the lumberman has taken, or the lightning has stricken. Any twig is likely to strike root, and any cutting made from a root as well.
The finest specimen I know grew from a walking-stick cut in the woods and thrust into the ground, by a mere chance, when the rambler reached home. It is the roof tree of a mansion, tall enough to waft its fragrance into the third-story windows, and to reach high above the chimney pots.
The range of this tree extends from New Brunswick to Dakota and south to Virginia and Texas. Its wood is used for carriage bodies, furniture, cooperage, paper pulp, charcoal, and fuel.