Pry

Pry is the old English word for a lime tree, specifically the small-leaved lime, Tilia cordata.  There are now many cultivars of lime, but only three types of lime are of real interest in the countryside - the rest are all garden specimens at heart.  Apart from pry, there is the large or broad leaved lime (T platyphyllos) and the common lime, which is hybrid between the small and large leave species, and is known as T x vulgaris (the x indicating it is a cross and not a species).  There is, of course, no connection between these trees and the citrus fruit, shown here in an understated but lovely bowl from Vellow Pottery in Somerset. However, the pry is the Linden tree of the German song and place names like Lyndhurst in the New Forest.

In the glory of their profuse yellow-green flowers and seeds, just coming to an end now, limes are hard to overlook, though often not identified.  Their leaves are typically heart shaped with an extended point, and often have an asymmetric bulge around the base of the heart by the stem.  I spent a pleasant hour in Kew Gardens recently, down by the Victoria Gate and this noble unicorn, examining their collections of lime species and cultivars.

Limes are rather unjustly overlooked in Britain in both history and the present. Pry was one of the dominant species of the original wildwood in these islands, particularly in the “limewood province”, pretty much all southern, central and eastern England apart from Devon and Cornwall, commonly in mixtures with hazel, elm, and ash.  It forms large mature trees, possibly the largest native broadleaf of British trees, reaching 150 feet in one form.  It’s pretty impervious to coppicing and pollarding, regrowing vigorously, and the oldest trees in England could be coppiced limes in enormous stools, one famous example being over 30 feet across. But it's spread across Britain may have been halted by a colder climate, and sadly, it is very sensitive to grazing, so the widespread habit of wood pasture and deer forests told against the lime.  The wood of the limes is soft and pale, and makes beautiful wood for fine carving - witness Grinling Gibbons in the late seventeenth century in London churches, and the extraordinary work of Tilman Riemenschneider the fifteeth century in southern Germany .

Pry is now uncommon as a wild tree in Britain , though it does occur frequently in some areas, notably in ancient woods in Essex and Sussex.  The large leaved lime is not common either in the wild, though there is a fine stand of them in the Cotswolds at The Woodland Trust's Lineover Wood near Cheltenham.  The hybrid, the common lime, is extremely robust and has been extensively planted in parks, gardens and urban settings.  Many suburban trees in London are common lime, sticky with aphid sundew, and bursting with bushy secondary growth around the trunks and obstructing the pavements.