THE narrator in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past famously sets off a train of memories when he eats a cake dipped in tea. He is reminded of Sunday mornings as a child when his Aunt Léonie would crumble a madeleine in her lime flower tea and give it to him. We all know the cake was a madeleine – even if we’ve never read Proust – but who recalls the importance to the narrator of the scent and taste of lime flower tea?
Unlike the French, we don’t drink this delicious tea very much. It’s only readily available in a herbal mixture that is intended to help you sleep. That seems to me somehow symbolic of the general lack of interest these days in one of the really great families of hardy deciduous trees. So indifferent are we that there is no recent English language book dedicated to the lime or linden – unlike ones for oak, ash, birch and yew, those other native stalwarts of our landscapes. Indeed, the genus gets scarcely more than a mention, was once found in ancient woodland all over southern England. Although now restricted to patches of woodland in Essex, Suffolk, Lincolnshire and Worcestershire, the pry (like most limes) is well suited to our climate and soils and, because it can be coppiced, is well-nigh immortal.
