Tilia

The Morton Arboretum holds six Nationally Accredited Plant Collections™. Tilia is the most recent addition, receiving accreditation in 2014. Current efforts include a thematic relocation of the core Tilia collection to a new site on the Arboretum’s East Side, owing to space constraints from an expanding Ulmus collection in the current site. In 2018, interpretation in the new site was expanded with three panels installed communicating the appeal and superior performance of Tilia as an urban street tree. Additionally, a large dome-shaped structure was built including hexagon-shaped components reminiscent of honeycomb, communicating the importance of Tilia to pollinators and serving as a gathering place for visitors. Several new taxa have been added to this collection in recent years, including rarely cultivated Tilia chinensis collected from recent fieldwork in China, as well as the cultivar Tilia ‘Zamoyskiana’, a selection from the Kornik Arboretum in Poland. Future work includes further plant exploration in China and Europe to capture the diversity of the genus present in those regions.