Lime tree in culture

The icons by the hand of Andrei Rublev, including the Holy Trinity (Hospitality of Abraham), and The Savior, now in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, are painted on linden wood.

Originally, local communities assembled not only to celebrate and dance under a linden tree, but to hold their judicial thing meetings there in order to restore justice and peace.

Thus the tree became associated with jurisprudence even after Christianization, such as in the case of the Gerichtslinde, and verdicts in rural Germany were frequently returned sub tilia (Unter der linden) until the Age of Enlightenment.

Herodotus says: "The Scythian diviners take also the leaf of the linden tree, which, dividing into three parts, they twine round their fingers; they then unbind it and exercise the art to which they pretend.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge features linden trees as an important symbol in his poem "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (written 1797; first published 1800).

In The Grimm Brothers' fairy tale The Frog Prince, the princess drops her golden ball into the pond while sitting under a linden tree.

In Swann's Way, the first book of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the narrator dips a petite madeleine into a cup of lime-blossom tea.

The story, set in the medieval period, tries to explain three huge linden trees whose branches intertwine to cover the entire cemetery of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Berlin (see The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse).

John Updike's novel The Centaur, like James Joyce in Ulysses, uses myth in an attempt to turn a modern and common scene into something more profound, a meditation on life and man's relationship to nature and eternity.

In it Updike parallels the lives of modern characters with the Greek myth in which Chiron's mother Philyra transforms into a linden tree to escape the shame of giving birth to a seemingly mutant half-horse, half-man as a result of her being raped by Cronus.

The unnamed narrator of the story re-visits a once abandoned and desolate village around which the man referenced by the books title (Elzéard Bouffier) has planted a forest over a period of 40 years.

Mihai Eminescu reportedly wrote some of his best works underneath this lime, rendering the tree one of Romania's most important natural monuments and an Iași landmark.

In Sweden, where the lime tree is named "Lind", the 100 most common surnames in 2015 included at 17 Lindberg (Lime-hill), at 21 Lindström (Lime-stream), at 22 Lindqvist (Lime-twig), at 23 Lindgren (Lime-branch), and at 99 Lindholm (Lime-island).