A manual of the botany of the Northern United States: Tiliaceae

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ORDER 23. TILIACEÆ. (LINDEN FAMILY)

Trees, with the mucilaginous properties, fibrous bark, and valvate calyx, &c., of the Mallow Family; but the petals imbricated in the bud, the stamens usually polyadelphous, and the anthers 2-celled; — represented in northern regions only by the genus

1. TILIA, L. LINDEN. BASSWOOD.

Sepals 5. Petals 4, spatulate-oblong. Stamens numerous: filaments cohering in 5 clusters with each other (in European species), or with the base of a spatulate petal-like body placed opposite the real petals. Pistil with a 5-celled ovary and 2 half-anatropous ovules in each, a single style, and a 5-toothed stigma. Fruit a sort of woody globular nut, becoming 1-celled and 1–2-seeded. Embryo with a taper radicle and a pair of leaf-like somewhat heart-shaped and lobed cotyledons, which are a little folded. — Fine trees, with soft and white wood, obliquely heart-shaped and serrate leaves, deciduous stipules, and small cymes of flowers, hanging on an axillary peduncle which is united to a leaf-like bract. Flowers cream-color, honey-bearing, fragrant. (The classical name of the genus.)

1. T. Americana, L. [1] (BASSWOOD.) Leaves green and glabrous or nearly so. — Rich woods. June. — This familiar tree is rarely called Lime-tree, oftener White-wood, commonly Basswood; the name (now obsolete in England) alluding to the use of the inner bark for mats and cordage.

2. T. heterophylla, Vent. [1] (WHITE BASSWOOD.) Leaves smooth and bright green above, whitened with a wooly down underneath. (T. alba, Michx.). — Mountains of Penn. and southward. — Leaves larger than in No. 1, often 8' broad.

T. Europæa, the EUROPEAN LINDEN, which is planted in and near our cities as an ornamental tree, is at once distinguished from any native species by the absence of the petal-like scales among the stamens. This tree (the Lin) gave the family name to Linnaeus.

[1] Latest opinion places all the native basswoods north of Mexico in a single species, T. americana, with T. heterophylla reduced to a variety of the former, as is T. caroliniana. (T. floridana is reduced to T. americana var. caroliniana.)

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