How Wide Is a Basswood Tree?

By Home & Garden Last updated Sunday, June/30/2024

The American Basswood

In North America, the American basswood is a common forest tree of the Midwest and Northeast. It favors wet soils but is adaptable to a variety of conditions. In addition to covering large areas along with a frequent associate in the sugar maple-basswood woodlands of the Midwest, this handsome tree also mingles with such species as black cherry, American elm, eastern white pine, yellow birch and American beech across its broad range.

In the U.S. Forest Service publication "The Silvics of North America" (1990), edited by Burns and Honkala, author T.R. Crow cites an average diameter at breast height -- a common measure in silviculture -- of between 36 and 48 inches for the American basswood. Crow notes that particularly well-developed specimens growing in the most amenable sites (say, fine-textured bottomland soils) may be 4.5 feet across in the trunk. Such massive basswoods may be better than two centuries old and soar 140 feet or more in the air. A more common height range is 50 to 70 feet.

The trunk of a big American basswood of mature age is often nearly black in color and, like many hardwoods, heavily furrowed. Younger trees have much smoother bark. Mature trees exhibit a full, round crown, comprised of stout branches and full foliage of large, toothed ovate leaves. Those leaves, which may be 5 to 7 inches long and 4 inches wide, are the largest of North American lindens. The clustered flowers and nuts hanging from bracts are distinctive. Rings of young American basswoods in mixed forests betray a common growth form, wherein an old individual sprouts new stems from its root crowns; when the mature specimen dies, a roughly circular grove of basswoods is left.

White basswood reaches its greatest development in the highlands of the Appalachians. Often associated with trees like black locust, cucumbertree, loblolly pine, northern red oak and black cherry, this linden may be 2.5 or 3 feet across in diameter. In "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Trees" (2002), David More and John White report diameters of better than 6 feet for the common lime, a Eurasian hybrid of two closely related species (the small- and large-leaved limes).