Tilia Americana - Basswood in Forest gardens

I rarely see this tree mentioned in Forest garden design, and I've never seen or planted it myself. But my nursery offers it for sale this year, and I looked it up, and it seems to check a lot of boxes!!

It is hardy to zone 3, tolerates full sun to full shade, prefers alkaline soil, has a Taproot structure, grows to 100ft tall and 75 wide, grows fast, has edible leaf buds with tea and medicinal use, it can be coppiced, and it's a dynamic accumulator! That's what my book says about them, anyway.

This seems like a perfect fit for my zone 4 forest garden! I've read that a natural relationship is to coppiced the tree at a height where the leaf buds can comfortably be picked and eaten. Meanwhile it has a Taproot going deep down and pulling nutrients, shedding them to the nearby garden in leaf matter and wood debris.

Has anyone experience planting and managing basswood trees? My gut says to buy a bunch and plant them, but it says that about every tree

Basswood produces some of the earliest flower buds of any plant or tree in the spring and honey bees love it.  A hive that is weak coming out of winter rely on basswood to have enough strength to make it until other plants start to bloom.

Supposedly you can make a chocolate substitute from the berries/seeds. I have never tried making chocolate from them, but I have tasted the berries and they have a flavor somewhat like very dark chocolate so they would probably make something that is somewhat similar in flavor to chocolate if you add enough sugar.

It makes great wood for food packaging.  It has a distinctive smell when it is being worked but that smell doesn't transfer to the food like other woods can.  It is a very fibrous wood so you can take a single thin board and bend 90 degree corners into it to make 4 sides of a box out of a single piece and no nails.

The wood is very lightweight.  It  makes nice lumber.

Sap suckers( a type of wood pecker)like it and don't appear to harm it.

Left to grow on its own in the woods is grows 60-80 feet tall, often straight as an arrow and no knots or branches for the bottom 40+ feet.

I don't know about copping it.  It is a poor choice for firewood.  It isn't rot resistant, so is a poor choice for fences, posts, and wattle and daub walls.  It makes good lumber but for that you want much larger trees.

These were common city trees around my old home, and I miss them a lot! Not just the leaf buds, but the leaves themselves are edible when young! Get them while they are still pale green, shiny, and short of full size: they taste magical. The one caveat is that some trees have fuzzy instead of smooth leaves, which are not nice to chew and very not nice if they stick in your throat. (Ask me how I know.) It might be a variation between Tilia species, or from tree to tree. The flowers do make a nice tea, especially from small-leaved linden, Tilia cordata. Their fragrance is stunning, even to stopping me in my tracks on a sidewalk!

They pollard basswood/linden/lime  trees in Europe

William Bronson wrote:They pollard basswood/linden/lime  trees in Europe

Is that done just to keep them short and manageable?  I would imagine a 25 foot tall tree in a urban area is probably easier and safer to deal with than a 80 foot tall tree.  Or is there another reason they cut them like that?

Thank you so much for the replies!

The woodworking use is very interesting - I do a little carpentry and carving, apparently it's quite soft and great for hand carving. Not good for fence posts, but I'm planning to grow black locusts which are great rot resistant wood.

Very curious about eating the leaves, does it have a lime flavor?

Coppicing and pollarding, I guess it depends what's around it in the forest garden and if it wants the shade. Lots of leaves means lots of mulch in the fall, which is going to be welcome.

Love to hear about its benefit to bees. I will plant some for them!

J Hillman wrote:
Is that done just to keep them short and manageable?  I would imagine a 25 foot tall tree in a urban area is probably easier and safer to deal with than a 80 foot tall tree.  Or is there another reason they cut them like that?

The reason it's done in present-day cities is probably just keeping them manageable, but in a permaculture setting there are some more very good reasons. The tree will live longer when pollarded, and produce way more biomass in its lifetime. That biomass can be used for fuel, or chipped and used for mulch, but the primary reason people used to pollard trees back in the day was to get fodder (tree-hay) for livestock. I believe linden was a favoured species for that purpose.

For keeping edible leaves at an accessible height,pollarding seems more effective than coppicing.
I only coppice incidentally, when I chop down trees I want gone and they just come back anyway.
Pollarding is something I do on purpose, to limit size.

A silvopasture system with basswood, mulberry and toon trees could offer a nice variety of leaves for man and beast.
All three have value as lumber, mulberry is very rot resistant and toon is akin to mahogany.
Basswood can also be tapped for syrup.

I found some Basswood growing on a walking path near where I work - I want to stop by in the spring so I can taste these leaves. I was thinking of collecting seed but it will take a long time for them to germinate or grow and my nursery sells 5-foot plants.

I'm planning to buy 15 or so Basswood trees for a fall planting, along with 15 black locust, for a supportive canopy layer over what will be my forest garden. After a few years, the black locust will be fixing nitrogen in the soil, and the basswood will be mining for nutrients with taproots and dropping them in fall leaves. Then the area will be well-suited for the food producing lower layers. Bees will also be very grateful for both trees.

30 trees is definitely too many for the area, so some will definitely come down. Fortunately both are very useful coppice, I bought some basswood and tried woodcarving with it and it really is a dream to carve with. BL I could always use tool handles, fence posts, stakes. If all else fails, there's no shame coppicing for firewood. The trees will still be doing their work with their roots and I can still eat the basswood leaves.

I recommend basswood highly. Their greens are some of my favorites to eat, and they are also a good fiber plant. When they are cut in spring, you will be able to peel off the bark and make it into rope and cordage, or weave it as a basketry material. The bark is also made into bark shoes (lapti). I have made a few from elm and birch bark—there are only a few basswood trees around—but I still need to improve at it.

I once took a basswood walking stick on a journey. It was not a sturdy enough branch and ended up bending, but I was able to turn it into a hair tie and a birch trumpet along the way. Quite versatile!

The winter buds are also one of the only vegetables—maybe the only one—available to harvest when snow is on the ground. They are the biggest and tenderest wild buds available, and possibly the mildest too; they are crunchy and mucilaginous, and taste a little muskier than the leaves, but are good enough, much better than pine needles when you are outside in winter and looking for a snack. Maybe if I were surviving off of the forest and ate basswood porridge every day, I would start to enjoy it.

Anyone have any information on using basswood for exterior siding?

Just talked to a guy who said “old timers” used to use a lot of basswood and hemlock for siding around here because thats what they had access too and as long as its kept dry it lasts. Plus they get big, they are light so easy to work with, cut easy, and hold paint and stain well.

Ive got access to several very large basswoods and a few of them need to come down anyway, and they arent really any good for firewood so I figured what else can I do with them besides make siding? And, since they are huge, i could get away with maybe having them sawn in whatever way that would leave the boards more stable during the drying process (quarter sawn?) and could make wide live edge boards for lap siding which i think is the look my wife and I would prefer over straight edged lap siding or even board and batten.

Any thoughts or opinions?

Basswood or linden (Tilia) is one of a relatively short list of hardy woody plants that bear edible foliage.  Only sourwood, rose-of-Sharon, and possibly mulberry come to mind as the only others I can think of.  The mulberries I've tried were disappointing, but I've definitely added all of the others to the occasional salad or "mess" of cooked greens.  All of them perform well with coppicing so that a summer-long supply of new foliage can be produced from a few stools....