The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Tilia cordata
Also called Littleleaf Linden, Linden, Little Leaved Linden, Small Leaf European Linden, Small Leaf Lime, Small Leaf Linden, Small Leaved European Linden
Small-leaved lime is a large deciduous shade tree from Europe, widely planted as an ornamental and street tree. It grows best in loamy soil and is not particularly drought resistant despite the article's drought tolerant tag.
Tilia cordata, the small-leaved lime or small-leaved linden, is a species of tree in the family Malvaceae, native to much of Europe. Its other common names include little-leaf or littleleaf linden, or traditionally in South East England, pry or pry tree. Its range extends from Britain and Scandinavia through mainland Europe to the Caucasus and West Asia. In the south of its range, it is restricted to high elevations.
Tilia cordata is widely grown as an ornamental tree. It was much planted to form avenues in 17th- and early 18th-century landscape planning. A famous example is Unter den Linden in Berlin. It is also widely cultivated in North America as a substitute for the native Tilia americana (American linden or basswood) which has a larger leaf, coarser in texture; there, it has been renamed "little-leaf linden". It is popular as a shade tree with its dense canopy, as an ornamental tree with its architectural shape, and as a street tree. In the US, T. cordata has been planted in Wellesley, Massachusettes; Modesto, California; Chicago, Illinois; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Atlanta, Georgia as street trees. Europe has espaliered trees owing to their ability to survive heavy pruning. T. cordata is an easy tree to train for bonsai when the training is not done all at once. Letting the tree recoup in between sessions over a period of several months creates a healthy, good-looking miniature tree.
The trees favour loamy soil sites, but can also be found on sandy, infertile soils and are not thought to be drought resistant. Dormant shoots of T. cordata can resist winter frost temperatures as low as −34 °C (−29 °F).
American basswood · Amur Linden · Ching's Lime · Crimean Lime · Japanese lime · Kyushu Lime · Manchurian Lime · Mongolian Lime · Oliver's Lime · Large-leaved Lime · Silver Lime · Lime
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Tilia cordata by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
