Linden / Basswood Tree

One of my biggest frustrations with foraging has been with recognition of plants in the spring. In the later seasons, many edibles have some extremely obvious recognizable characteristic (e.g. the pods on a milkweed). But often the best time to eat these things are in the spring before they mature. Maybe that is why foraging takes so much time to get good at. You need to go through many complete seasonal cycles to really understand a plant and how to recognize it.

For example:
In Sam Thayer's first book, he raves about the linden or basswood tree. I looked for one all spring to no avail. But finally this past Sunday I found my first one at a park about 10 miles from my house. This is a pretty easy tree to recognize this time of year because of its funny leafy "bracts"... But the best edible part of the tree according to the book is the young leaves in early spring. I'm not sure I'd be able to recognize the tree at that time of year, without those funny bracts to help me out. So after Sunday, my plan was to remember to go back to that park and that tree in the spring again and study it as its leaves come out. Hopefully then I could get some practice recognizing it in that stage.

Today as I was walking to lunch, I found another linden tree around the corner from my office. On my first tree, I tried some of the nuts, which weren't too bad, although they were fairly small. I tried some of the nuts on this tree too, but they clearly were not ripe enough to be eaten.