Lime

Also called: linden, basswood, tilia

Lime is a pale, close-grained hardwood cut from the lime tree, Tilia, and among woodworkers it is prized above almost anything else for how cleanly it carves. Its American relative, basswood, comes from the same genus and shares many of the same working qualities.

Character and grain

European lime grows practically free of knots, and its texture stays even from piece to piece, which is what makes it suit fine, detailed carved work. It rarely splits, whichever way it is cut, so a carver can work into it from any direction. Basswood, the American member of the same family, can be picked out from the similar-looking aspen under magnification: its rays, the strips of tissue that run across the grain and show as flecks on a cut face, are several cells wide, and its cells carry spiral thickenings, a ridged pattern inside the cell wall, which aspen's cells lack. In the American trade, the name 'white basswood' denotes the pale sapwood, or sometimes the wood itself, of either American basswood species.

Working it

Lime is simple to cut and shape, whether by hand tool or machine. Its mechanical properties are modest: European lime rates only average for bending and crushing strength, and poor for stiffness and for resisting sudden shock. Accounts differ on how well it holds its size. Ellis, writing in 1908, cautioned that basswood keeps changing dimension with humidity and warps badly, and needs careful handling as a result. USDA data from 2021 gives a more measured account: American basswood shrinks a great deal in width and thickness while it dries, but rarely warps once it is in service. The two accounts may simply be describing different moments in the wood's life, handling in use against behaviour while drying, but they leave a different impression of how much the wood moves.

Uses

Lime-tree wood was the material behind Grinling Gibbons's carving at both St Paul's Cathedral and Windsor Castle. European lime remains a favoured choice for carving and for parts of musical instruments. In the Edwardian era it was commonly turned into small boxes for chemists, carved into toys, and worked into piano soundboards and blind-wood, the hidden structural wood built into an instrument that is never meant to be seen. It has also gone into turned items and boards used as leatherworking surfaces. On parts of the European continent lime wood was sometimes made into clogs, and in Japan, where the tree is called Linden, it was used to make sandals. To colour glue so that it matched basswood, finishers traditionally mixed in gamboge, a yellow dye.