Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Linnaeus himself carried this tree in his surname: his family took their name from a great specimen of the genus on their land, while the genus name is simply what the Romans called it. Its many {stamens} are not free of one another but bound into five bundles, and between them stand petal-like sterile {staminodes} that make no pollen at all. A chewed leaf or a shred of inner bark turns slippery rather than puckering, thick with {mucilage} instead of tannin. Young leaves and the wall of the ripening fruit carry {stellate} hairs, each branching from a single point like a minute asterisk. Every hanging flower cluster is slung from a pale papery strap 3 to 5 inches (7 to 13 cm) long that is fused along part of the flower stalk and later spins the ripe crop away from the tree on the wind. The undivided heart-shaped blade sits crooked on its stalk, one half of the base running noticeably further down than the other. In June and July the small pale yellow flowers pour out a sweet honeyed scent carrying well across a clearing, and the crop supports a named commercial honey in the eastern United States and Canada. Its blades run 3 to 8 inches (7 to 20 cm) long and nearly as broad, coarsely toothed and far bigger than those of the imported relatives planted along city streets. It is a canopy dominant of rich {mesic} hardwood forest from southern Manitoba to northern Florida, reaching its greatest size in the deep-soiled cove forests of the southern Appalachians. Indigenous peoples across its range stripped and retted its inner bark, the {bast}, into rope, fishing line, netting and baskets, and that fibre is exactly what the blunt one-word American name of this tree records.

Accepted Answer

Tilia americana

Name That Plant #100