In The Limelight

In the fierce heat-haze of a still mid afternoon in July, John Lewis-Stempel finds some welcome shade when lopping boughs off a magnificent old lime tree for fodder

- John Lewis-Stempel

UNDER a spreading lime tree. Outside the sanctuary circle of shade, only heat-haze and a dissolving world. Despite the belly-dancing undulating of the air beyond the tree, there’s a stillness to the air of the the mid afternoon, as if I were stuck in a glass hothouse; the sole sounds are the hacksawing of cicadas in the walnut orchard and the equally rhythmic, metallic clicking of tree-loppers.

I’m cutting the lower fronds of the lime tree—the large-leaved variety, Tilia platyphyllos—my ladder propped against the trunk; this, at 9ft in girth, has the stature of a Parthenon pillar, but it’s deeply creased, in the manner of old elephant’s skin. Up and down the bark’s cracks scuttle firebugs, brilliant and scarlet. In the cavelight, the tree seems to seep blood.

The lime is a pollard and the three main branches atop the trunk have been cut repeatedly over the decades to produce Medusa masses of whippy branches and a canopy so dense it permits no poetic shivelight or romantic dappling. Under the lime tree, the shadow is seamless.

No ornament, my lime (although it is hermaphroditically attractive, with its masculine frame and its feminine frilly bathing-cap foliage). Like the other limes planted in remote Charente in the 19th century, it was intended as a multi-tasking working tree: to supply the house with shade—that welcome gloom —in summer and to furnish wood for the home fires in winter. The same wood, easy to work and hard to split, would have been carved for toys and cut for poles.

On and on go the historic French uses of le tilleul. The flowers fed the bees, flavoured drinks. In Alain-Fournier’s 1913 novel Le Grande Meaulnes, a requiem in advance for lost idealism (the author himself was killed in the First World War), the schoolboy