Tilia americana

American linden or American basswood is a species of tree in the mallow or Malvaceae family, native to eastern North America, from southern Saskatchewan to New Brunswick, southwest to northeast Oklahoma, southeast to South Carolina, and west along the Niobrara River to Cherry County, Nebraska. It can reach a height of 37 m tall.

It grows faster than many North American hardwoods, often twice the annual growth rate of American beech and many birch species, and can attain 200 years of age.

• Crown is domed, the branches spreading, often pendulous; bark is gray to light brown, with narrow, well defined fissures; winter buds are stout, ovate-acute, smooth, deep red, with two bud scales visible.
• Leaves are deciduous, simple, alternate, ovate to cordate, asymmetrical, unequal at the base (the side nearest the branch the largest), 5–15 cm long and 5–12 cm across (leaves occasionally significantly larger) , with a long, slender petiole, a coarsely serrated margin and a pointed apex. They open from the bud folded length-wise; colour is pale green, downy, and when full grown is dark green, smooth, shining above, paler beneath, with tufts of rusty brown hairs in the axils of the primary veins. Fall color is yellow-green to yellow. Both the twigs and leaves have thick sap.
• Flowers are small, yellowish-white, 1–1.4 cm across, in drooping cymes with clusters of 6–20 with a whitish-green leaf-like bract attached for half its length at the base of the cyme. They are perfect (hermaphroditic – with both pistils and stamens), with five sepals, with the pistil extending visibly above the anthers.
• Fruit hanging beneath the leaf-like bract is a small, globose, downy, hard and dry cream-colored nutlet 8–10 mm in diameter.