Anyone know what kind of tree this is? My in-laws from Romania say you can make tea from the flowers, and we were going to try to find the tea in a grocery store but aren’t sure what it would be called.
Looks like a Whitebeam, but I’m not familiar with that exact leaf shape.
http://www.barcham.co.uk/sites/default/files/imagecache/page_slideshow/F4_-_Sorbus_aria_lutescensflower.JPG
Looks like a Linden to me.
Its a good match for Tilia aka Linden.
… The tea is then called Linden Tea , which is flavoured with the flower of the tree.
The american varieties can be used to make tea, too.
Right. The American variety is also called basswood. You can recognize the heart-shaped leaf of either variety easily.
In Finland, the tea is made from neither the flowers nor the leaves, but from small, soft, elongated secondary leaf-like parts – I think maybe they’re “brachts”?
That’s “bracts”
Lindens - what we call lime trees in Britain - that’s it. Our car is currently covered in the flowers from this tree. I didn’t realise you could make tea from the flowers, but every spring I like to eat a few green lime-tree leaves.
When the bracts fall off they tend to block the drains, which is helpful.
The flowers are delicious - they can be made into tea, cordial and also fermented into a fizzy drink. They have a delicate, melon-like flavour.
Hope this isn’t considered spam - here’s a link to my own web page on the topic:
http://www.atomicshrimp.com/st/content/lime_flower_cordial/
It is the linden tree! Thanks everyone for your help! It doesn’t look like our local grocery stores carry that kind of tea though, so we’ll have to order it online.
And thanks Magetout, we will definitely try your cordial & ice cube ideas!
Linden also produces a very fine honey (with the help of bees, of course).
Yes - the Lime trees around here are usually audibly buzzing with bees when I walk past. I would feel guilty about picking the flowers for my own use, were it not the fact that the tree produces them so copiously, mostly out of my reach.
And for the dark side of the Linden tree (audio NSFW):
I always assumed that sketch just got the tree wrong. Linden trees smell like melon and flowers to me. Sweet chestnut smells like semen.
Could be. Around UC Davis there were a large number of “semen trees”; I think the consensus is that the Bradford Pears were the culprit. I assumed other trees might have the same… characteristic.
There’s something about the Sweet Chestnut that makes me unsurprised about the scent.
Also, Cecil’s take on the topic (scroll down). The chestnut does appear to be one source. The Linden isn’t mentioned.
Linden honey, in large quantities, and of some varieties, is poisonous to some bumblebees. You can find dead bumblebees under the tree sometimes.
Cars parked under linden trees sometimes get splotches of sticky dark grey stuff on the roof.
That is the leaf honey. Leaf honey is made by the lice that suck lots of linden tree sap. Tree sap is rich in sugar, but poor in protein. To get enough protein, the lice have to drink lots of tree sap and secrete the majority of it from their abdomen. Ants harvest this sap, and often protect the aphids to get more of the sap. Bees harvest it too, it is the dark honey they collect at the end of summer. But if there are no ants or bees to harvest the secreted sap, it falls out of the tree like a sweet sticky rain. If that rain falls on cars, there is an certain airborne omnipresent fungus that immediately colonizes the sweet patches and turns them into dark grey mouldy patches,like this on a car hood. It looks like this on the leaves itself. But it washes right off.
Yeah - the trees around here are always teeming with aphids. Clouds of them when the branches are shaken - the aphids are on my list of potential wild food sources (I think they could be harvestable in sufficient quantity to be eaten - just haven’t decided on the method of cooking)