In a grove of lindens

It's almost time for the lindens to start their flowering glory, and what better place to experience linden-hood than the west side of Cheesman Park.  There are rows of stately lindens that already are throwing a deep shade on the lovely lawns, creating a real English park effect.

   Trees thrive when they're planted in groups like this, and it's a magical experience to walk into a man-made grove of same-species trees like this, especially ones that have been well-cared for, watered, and well trimmed.

   Lindens throw a very deep shade, and they grow in a compact way, almost spire-like.  In the third photo down you can see the distinctive way their branches extend when they've been well-trimmed.

   They don't have that fountain-shape that I associate with the ideal shade trees like elms.  

   Early on they can assume a kind of heart-shape, wide at the bottom and tapering up, kind of onion-dome like (the lindens on Pine Street between 12 and 15th in Boulder).  More mature lindens grow more columnar, and I haven't seen but a couple of venerable giants (south west corner of Pine and 16th in Boulder, a battered giant on north side of Spruce between 22nd and 23rd).

    Get ready for their flowering, though!  There is really nothing like it in our urban forest.  They will soon be blanketing the night-time streets with the most heavenly-sweet honeyed odor of their blossoms.  

   One of the advantages of their exuberant and messy growth pattern is that unless they are trimmed, lindens will sprout branches very low on their trunks.  When they flower you can literally lose yourself nose-wise in bouquets of blossoms located conveniently and abundantly directly at nostril level.  

    On moonlit June nights, to drink in deep effortless draughts of this Elysian perfume is surely as near to the smell of Paradise as we're likely to get in this lifetime. 

    The Nissan dealership on the corner of Mapleton and 28th planted a row of 10 or so lindens on the south side of Mapleton that acted as a great shield and hedge to their back parking lot.  They never bothered to trim these lindens, and one June night I stumbled on the flowering Elysian fields of their flowering.  I wandered back and forth, from tree to tree, inhaling great gulps and trying to decide which tree smelled more like honey vanilla, or more like maple syrup with lemon, or which one was like orange sherbet and which had a hint of cherry.  As I stumbled scent-drunk down the line of trees, the flowering branches created odorous fortresses around each tree, extending out in a honey-scented radius.

    Early this year to my dismay I saw a team of gardeners had been called in to give the trees a proper haircut and trim-job.  All branches up to about 10 feet were removed.  The row of lindens now looks like cared-for urban trees, but gone is their protective foliage that hid the ugly wall and parking lot, and gone will be the chance to have such gloriously abundant direct 'nostril-to-angel' nose-level aromatherapy this year.   I'm sure it's good to encourage the trees to grow higher, and to clean up their messy lower branches, but ah, what a loss.  

   For a while, lindens were the go-to tree for the City of Boulder parkings, to replace the large plantings of silver maples.   They're everywhere----look across from the Casey Middle School football field on the west side of 14th St, along what used to be the Kaiser Permanente building.  They planted those lindens 20 years ago, and they've shot up into healthy 30 foot spires.  They're nice, don't get me wrong, but they just don't have all that pleasing or generous a shade-tree shape.  They're just too self-contained.  I know the City foresters prefer this because they're less prone to wind and storm damage.  

    Every spring I go up on a ladder and trim painstakingly all the very numerous dead twigs and branches off the linden in front of my house---it's also about 21 years old now, and I do love this little tree.  It leaves out so beautifully and bravely---while it's neighbor catalpa is hardly showing a green shoot, it will be fully decked out in it's soft magnificent spring green.  It can get very surprised by those deadly spring snows, and I try to get out there with a broom and relieve the stress on those pliable branches when they get bent almost to the ground.   I know it loves the attention of the careful pruning and trimming I give it every year, and literally fluffs up and leafs out even more fully in return.

     Lindens are dense, deep and dark.  They're a solid, fairly quick growing tree, but not as tolerant of stress as the City of Boulder probably hoped.  In my opinion they don't have  enough of the resilience, versatility, and drought tolerance that the frugal, thrifty early homeowners/settlers of Boulder were looking for.  They found those attributes in silver maples, catalpas, green ashes and Plains cottonwoods.  The three lindens they planted on the Pearl Street Mall in front of the old Art Cinema, directly south of the courthouse?  Remember them, all watered and cared for and primped by the ground crews that watch over the Mall plantings?  They got about 30 years old, about 30 or 40 feet tall, but they got sick, spindly, stressed, started to die of.  Now they're  all gone--they've been replaced by sycamore/London plane tree saplings  

   Good luck, Boulder.  Don't get me wrong, I am a sycamore fanatic.  I adore and worship sycamore trees.  If you want to get high, go down to Naropa and gaze up at those fantastic mottled beauties on the west and east side of the old Lincoln Elementary.  But sycamores are having a tough time on these stressful Boulder streets.  The ones they put in around the Post Office at 15th and Walnut didn't make it.  The sapling in front of Ted's Montana Grill, near the Laughing Goat has been replaced, and the new little one is struggling.  The sycamores get some kind of disease, their leaves wilt.  Look at the sycamore on the west side of 19th at Salberg Park.  It doesn't thrive.  Wish the one they put in on the northwest corner of Spruce and 14th--- the Shambala Center (the old Public Service Building)---luck.  If only 30 years from now the corner of Spruce and 14th could have the rustling leaves of a mature sycamore shading the busy street, like they do all over Europe.  Sycamores are the saving grace of all those European cities, from Paris to Rome to London.  Man's best friend may not really be a dog but rather a sycamore.  I sure wish they did better in Boulder.  I'd love to be able to back off on my Silver Maple rant, with a beautiful tree species that I thought stood half a chance with our ridiculous winds, our terrible droughts and heat waves, our ever increasing air pollution, and of course the absolute reality of brutal climate change charging at us, wanting to turn the Colorado plains into the Sonoran desert.

   Tangentially, I walked past 8th and Mapleton and looked at the canopy that is struggling to regenerate itself along the 4 rows of trees that line the Mapleton parkway.  We had a big fundraiser, spearheaded partly by my father, back in the late 60's/early 70's to plant maples to replace the big trees that were going to be lost to age and storms.  What did the City of Boulder plant?  Sugar maples, primarily, and red maples, some Norways and some Schweldlers.    35 years later, we would have rows of magnificent mature Silver Maples, had the City Forester followed the wisdom of the early settlers.  But no.  We have sporadic rag tag rows of filler saplings, full of holes.  They're not very good-sized sugar, red and occasional Norway maples, stressed and and struggling.  Nothing like the canopy of arching, gnarly, silver giants that I grew up walking to school under.  I repeat, there is no maple species that comes close to thriving in our climate like the silver maple.  The growth rate of silver maples is about the most gratifying thing in the entire urban forest lexicon.   In our mayfly human life-span we can actually see year by year as silver maples become magificent specimens.  And we get to enjoy their beautiful shaggy trunks that turn into real shade trees, in this life! Not the next generation, but ours!  And, since I follow Lucretius and Epicurus, I firmly believe this is the only life we get, and there are no trees in an afterlife that will shade our spirits.  Since it is our right and duty as humans to enjoy pleasure in this very life, much of which is found in observing, touching, noticing, and living intimately with and amid trees, lets plant trees for our old-age that we will get to sit in our rocking chairs under.

    Of course, I love a great many, if not most, tree species, and there is a place for a lot of variety and diversity.  But when they hit upon a good thing, in a very difficult-on-trees climate-zone like Boulder, it makes sense to listen and respect your forebears and learn by observation what species thrives and recovers quickly, and to follow suit and plant what they planted!  I still say, those unsophisticated tree-planters who probably didn't have fancy forestry degrees knew a thing or two about the many blessed benefits that so outweigh the weak points of the silver maple.  

   But wait, I was blogging about the linden.  Well, good old Tilia Americana is a hard tree to find fault with, but it's just not a knock-your-socks off kind of tree shape or shade pattern. And it's a pretty slow grower.   Look at the solitary specimens that shade so many lawns of north Boulder bungalows, and ranch houses in Table Mesa and South Boulder.  The shade is so dense, the shape so columnar and contained, that you can't say 'Grows well with others.'  It's not a dappled shade, it's a deep darkness under those dense branches.  And lindens get stressed fairly easily.  Every year the linden on the southeast corner of Spruce and 15th---in the street parking---loses half it's crown to some kind of brown-leaf shrivel.  I always think it's going to die and be removed, but it bounces back, sort of.  Up the street on the south side of Spruce directly behind the Courthouse you can see a little linden that is half-dead and valiantly struggles to survive with only half of it's leaf mass every year.  It just can't get ahead in that brutal heat and traffic on Spruce. 

   But my blissful stroll today down the magnificent linden--shaded walkways of Cheesman Park reminded me that if you have the generous acreage for rolling estate lawns---English manor style----and can plant lindens in stately rows, they make for quite the glorious and inspiring urban forest.
    Yes, we all can use a little of that upright and solid royal lineage called linden pedigree!