Lime

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top 1000Wild Food
Wild Food

By Roger Phillips

Published 1986

  • About

Tilia europaea The lime tree is introduced throughout Britain. It is deciduous and has been widely planted over a long period, especially in copses, parks, gardens and roadsides. It flowers in June or early July.

The flowers are used to make linden tea, which is famous for its delicious taste and soothing effect on the digestive and nervous system. Honey from lime flowers is regarded as the best flavoured and most valuable in the world and is used extensively in medicine and liqueurs. The leaves exude a saccharine matter with the same composition as the manna of Mount Sinai and the sap has been used to make sugar. During the last century, Missa, a French chemist, found that the fruit of the lime, ground up with some of the flowers in a mortar, furnished a substance much resembling chocolate in flavour.