Tilia tomentosaMoench

Silver LimeSilver Lindensilver limesilver lindenwhite linden

WFO wfo-0000457026 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Tilia tomentosa, photographed by Mila C.
fig. a Mila C., CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-08 / obs. 204479570

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 3518242
Filed as
Tilia tomentosa Moench
Det. by
Lopez, Ida C., (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
Collected
W. J. Kress, I. C. Lopez, L. B. Zhang, S. White, M. Brown, L. López & M. Kniffin 2007-06-14
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 11 botanical countries

Regions where Tilia tomentosa is native: East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, Türkiye, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, NW. Balkan Pen., Romania, Türkiye-in-Europe, Ukraine East Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaTürkiyeAlbaniaBulgariaGreeceHungaryNW. Balkan Pen.RomaniaTürkiye-in-EuropeUkraine
Native distribution of Tilia tomentosa, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Bulgaria BUL
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Romania ROM
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Ukraine UKR
East Aegean Is. EAI ASIA-TEMPERATE
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Türkiye TUR

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 454 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -6.4 °C -2.5 °C 3.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.6 °C 26.1 °C 29.9 °C
Annual rainfall 525 mm 826 mm 1,330 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 80 mm 150 mm 272 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 454 research-grade observations of Tilia tomentosa that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Named cultivars 2 recorded

Selections of Tilia tomentosa that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.

From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.

Also published as 19 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Lindnera alba Fuss
  • Tilia alba Waldst. & Kit.
  • Tilia alba Aiton
  • Tilia alba var. petiolaris (DC.) Loudon
  • Tilia argentea DC.
  • Tilia communis var. argentea (DC.) K.F.Schimp. & Spenn.
  • Tilia gigantea Dippel
  • Tilia glauca Schwein. ex Bayer
  • Tilia macrophylla hort. ex Steud.
  • Tilia pannonica J.Jacq. ex Bayer
  • Tilia peduncularis Delile ex Bayer
  • Tilia petiolaris DC.
  • Tilia pseudolongirostris J.Wagner ex Vöröss
  • Tilia rotundifolia Vent.
  • Tilia tomentosa f. pendula Schelle
  • Tilia tomentosa subsp. petiolaris Soó
  • Tilia tomentosa var. inaequalis Simonk.
  • Tilia tomentosa var. obliqua Thüm.
  • Tilia tomentosa var. pannonica Borbás

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.