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Common Name: American Basswood Scientific Name: Tilia americana Location: Eastern Parkway Service Road North between New York and Nostrand Avenues Leaf Pattern: Cordate (heart-shaped) Leaflet Margins: Coarsely serrate (toothed) Tree Habit/Form: Oval In mid-June, walk south on New York Avenue and make a right on Eastern Parkway’s north service road. Keep walking until you’ve passed through a wall of sweetly fragrant air. Look up into the canopy. Three American Basswood will seem to be looking down at you with hundreds of tiny dangling droplets of honey-scented flowers. Beneath the heart-shaped (cordate) leaves, each flower stem is complete with a lime green tongue-depressor-shaped proto-leaf that seems to say “hey! my nectar is up here.” This non-leaf appendage has most likely evolved to say just that—though not to us humans, but to the solitary bumble bees who have co-evolved with Basswood for 24 million years. Though not planted in ideal conditions on this particular street, Basswood can actually withstand some of the harshest conditions in the wild: periodic flooding, salt, drought, and perhaps the tree’s favorite: fire. Basswood prolifically re-sprouts from the base when burned down, burnt out (stressed), or cut down. Many flowering trees do this to varying degrees, but Basswood has equipped themselves with a powerful tool of adaptation called the lignotuber. The tree’s base swells, holding the potential for thousands of new sprouts that could eventually replace the existing specimen if damaged. The entrance to Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Children’s Garden has an exceptional example of this. Basswood is just one example of many forms of life that are equipped with mechanisms to adapt. In the face of a warming, shifting, and increasingly unpredictable world, what mechanisms can we design to endure it? Looking towards plants for inspiration could be a first step.
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