The Linden
July 20, 2013
Photo by Kidist P. Asrat
KIDIST P. ASRAT, at Reclaiming Beauty, writes about the linden tree here and here. The linden is of the Tilia genus of trees and is also commonly called the lime tree or basswood. It has heart-shaped leaves and yellowish-green, fragrant flowers.
When I think of lindens I think of Tolstoy, who grew up among lime trees at his estate Yasnaya Polyana and mentions them in his books, including in this scene from Anna Karenina in which Levin and his wife Kitty, who is with their baby son, get caught in a thunder storm:
In that brief interval of time the storm-clouds had moved on, covering the sun so completely that it was dark as an eclipse. Stubbornly, as though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin, and tearing the leaves and flowers off the lime-trees and stripping the white birch branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it twisted everything on one side—acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, and tall tree-tops. The peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into shelter in the servants’ quarters. The streaming rain had already flung its white veil over all the distant forest and half the fields close by, and was rapidly swooping down upon the copse. The wet of the rain spirting up in tiny drops could be smelt in the air. 9
Holding his head bent down before him, and struggling with the wind that strove to tear the wraps away from him, Levin was moving up to the copse and had just caught sight of something white behind the oak-tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the vault of heaven seemed crashing overhead. Opening his blinded eyes, Levin gazed through the thick veil of rain that separated him now from the copse, and to his horror the first thing he saw was the green crest of the familiar oak-tree in the middle of the copse uncannily changing its position. ‘Can it have been struck?’ Levin hardly had time to think when, moving more and more rapidly, the oak-tree vanished behind the other trees, and he heard the crash of the great tree falling upon the others. 10
The flash of lightning, the crash of thunder, and the instantaneous chill that ran through him were all merged for Levin in one sense of terror. 11
‘My God! my God! not on them!’ he said. 12
And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that they should not have been killed by the oak which had fallen now, he repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this senseless prayer. 13
Running up to the place where they usually went, he did not find them there. 14
They were at the other end of the copse under an old lime-tree; they were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (they had been light summer dresses when they started out) were standing bending over something. It was Kitty with the nurse. The rain was already ceasing, and it was beginning to get light when Levin reached them. The nurse was not wet on the lower part of her dress, but Kitty was drenched through, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Though the rain was over, they still stood in the same position in which they had been standing when the storm broke. Both stood bending over a perambulator with a green umbrella. 15
‘Alive? Unhurt? Thank God!’ he said, splashing with his soaked boots through the standing water and running up to them. 16
Kitty’s rosy wet face was turned towards him, and she smiled timidly under her shapeless sopped hat. 17
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I can’t think how you can be so reckless!’ he said angrily to his wife. 18
‘It wasn’t my fault, really. We were just meaning to go, when he made such a to-do that we had to change him. We were just …’ Kitty began defending herself. 19
Mitya was unharmed, dry, and still fast asleep. 20
‘Well, thank God! I don’t know what I’m saying!’ 21
They gathered up the baby’s wet belongings; the nurse picked up the baby and carried it. Levin walked beside his wife, and, penitent for having been angry, he squeezed her hand when the nurse was not looking.
— Comments—
Joseph Ebbecke writes:
I have always been delighted by the name of ” Unter den Linden,” the magical, historic boulevard in Berlin, though I have never been there.
The original trees were planted in 1647, along a path to the Elector of Brandenburg’s hunting lodge. This print shows “Lindenallee” in 1691. The original trees were cut down for firewood in the bleak final years of WWII. The present trees were replanted in the 1950s.
