The fragrance catches me mid-step; a potent floral, it tickles the back of my nose and throat. Honeyed, ambrosial, sweet—almost too sweet. In the middle of the University of Toronto's Victoria College quadrangle, I am transported three thousand miles east and three years earlier, back to Poland. Sniffing the breeze, I spin around and around to locate the source. There! An unimposing tree in a stone-studded concrete planter about thirty meters away, its branches barely reaching the second story of the Northrop Frye Hall. As I near it, I recognize the heart-shaped leaves and the deeply grooved, grayish bark on the slender trunk I can circle with my hands. It's a . . . What is it called in English?“What's the name of this tree?” I ask a passing student.His goggles at me, then he shrugs. “What am I, a forestry student?”How can you not know the name of the trees that grow around you? I wonder if all Canadians are like that. I know it as lipa, pronounced LEE-pah; in Polish, its name the origin of the name for July—lipiec. Its tall, domed crowns tower over fields and line country roads, palace driveways, and city avenues: a staple of my childhood landscape—a landscape where I no longer belong and which I suddenly miss with my whole being.It will take a while to discover the tree's English name—it was the summer of 1983, decades before instant Internet searches or translations. The four-volume Polish-English dictionary I lugged across the Atlantic when my family emigrated suggested “lime” as a translation, which brought to mind the sour green citrus and not the trees of my childhood. It wasn't until I read Austen's “Emma” that I understood that “common lime” was the English name of this tree and that, just like in Poland, it grew in espaliers along manor driveways. In Europe, it is also known as linden (from German, with Under den Linden—“under the linden trees”—being the throughway in Berlin that leads from the Brandenburg Gate to Kaiser Palace), and in America as basswood.Had I known its Latin name–Tilia x europaea—I probably would have been able to learn much sooner what the tree's English name was, even if what I was smelling was Tilia x americana, the linden's North American cousin.I had learned most of my trees from reading about them as a child, not from seeing them. Many I knew only from description: Weeping willows dip their long branches into village streams, slender alders whisper on the mountain meadows, palms sough and droop their fronds. Several types of conifers appeared in our apartment at various Christmases: Balsam fir was the best because its needles lasted the longest, while the pine's were too long to hook ornaments. Three species I knew better—oak and horse chestnut because of the nuts and acorns they dropped every fall, and the unmistakable black-and-white-barked birches. But lipas I knew with all my senses.A thick branch straddled between my ten-year-old thighs, hidden in the deep emerald shade of the cordate leaves and sky-reaching boughs, the leaves murmuring in the faint breeze. I have climbed the century-old linden tree growing in my Aunt Adela's yard to pick its blossoms. I'm dizzy with height and the overpowering scent. My ears buzz with the bees—thousands of them descend on the tree at dawn and work away until dusk, collecting pollen. Droplets of clear nectar shine on the tiny flowers, sticky on my fingertips and palms. Minuscule white petals, green stamens dotted with golden specs, each cluster protected by a pale green bract, the whole shorter than my pinky finger. The aroma is like a living thing wrapping me in its folds. I inhale, deep, deep, and almost lose my balance.Hours spent climbing from branch to branch, filling my basket with thousands of bracted flowers and bracts, sliding down the trunk only to empty it and clamber up again. From the tallest bough, where the shade is dappled, I loom over the village's red-tiled roofs, even over the weathered wooden slats of the barn. The pine forest on the horizon is pierced by the church steeple five kilometers away and the chimes of the bells reach my ears as they toll for noon mass. Black-and-white cows dot the meadows, a horse drags a wagon back from the farmers’ market in the city, wheat fields ripen gold behind my aunt's house. This is what flying must be like.“Małgosia! You'll fall!” my aunt calls from below, her neck extended as she struggles to see me, her hand on the thick bark of the tree for balance. “Come down—we've got enough flowers to last three winters.”I linger on the bough, my feet dangling. I imagine my aunt spreading the blossoms on a baking sheet where they will dry in the heat rising from her charcoal-burning stove. When dry, she will transfer them into glass jars where they will await my cousins’ first autumn sniffles and coughs. She will scoop two heaping teaspoons of the dried flowers into a mug, pour boiling water over it, and let them steep for five minutes, steaming, the pale lemon-yellow linden herbal tea a remedy for colds and fevers. And a memory evoker, for it was his aunt's linden-flower tea that Proust recalled upon tasting the madeleine that fateful afternoon.Decades later, in the warm kitchen of my own home in Hamilton, I lift a stainless-steel spoon out of the honey jar—the thick pale-yellow liquid coats the spoon's bowl and flows down in a wide ribbon that folds on the surface before it sinks into the honey with of a tail of tiny bubbles. A woodlands scent with hints of menthol, camphor, and mint—a noseful. When fresh and raw, linden honey is a clear liquid with a hint of green; it darkens to amber-gold when mature and studded with sugar crystals.Linden-flower honey is produced by bees in hives set in proximity of a linden tree. A cure for the common cold and stomach flu—often doubled up with linden flower tea. Avicenna, a medieval Muslim philosopher and physician, claimed that he had cured epilepsy, headaches, rheumatism, and kidney diseases with linden honey and called it liquid gold. By volume, forty percent of honey is glucose, and because of this, pure honey is quick to crystallize—only nonartificial, nonmodified honey extrudes yellowed sugar lumps onto its surface, giving the honey a granular texture. Organic apiarists extol its electrolyte and microelement composition for its resemblance to human plasma, but it's a pure coincidence, of no medicinal value. Honey contains vitamin B1 and B2, niacin, vitamin C, biotin, and vitamin K but not in significant amounts—one would grow quite fat if honey were the only source of those micronutrients in the diet. It is also rich in tannins, which give honey its astringent properties.After licking the spoon—the honey sweet and delicately sour, with a trace of a bitter aftertaste—I scoop a spoonful and pour it from a height into a mug of steaming Assam tea. I watch it curl and dissolve into the amber liquid. Honeyed tea—the best drink for reading on an early December evening, as dusk falls and the window panes glow like mirrors, my living room doubled, hazy, beyond the glass. It would be even better if it were snowing, I think as I curl on the sofa under a wool blanket, a fragrant cloud rising from the tea on the coffee table, a book in my lap.The small ebony disc begins to rotate, the needle drops, and faint scratches fill the room. Plink-plink-plink—three short, happy notes, each higher than the previous one; a lively waltz. A violin pizzicato followed by a boyish tenor singing in Polish: You shall gather flowersYou shall smile a lotYou shall count the starsYou shall wait for meAnd you, just you, shall be my ladyAnd you, only you, shall be my queen.My feet in their small square-nosed sandals follow the rhythm and I glide across the rug, dipping with every third step. I twirl, bow to the “lady” and to the “queen,” imagine myself in a medieval castle with a golden cone of a hat draped with a veil that follows me, fluttering, as I stumble on my pirouette.The song came out in 1967, so I might have been four or five years old when the 45 record made its way to my parents’ mono turntable. Styled on medieval troubadours’ songs, it promised the object of affection linden fiddles playing and rowan groves singing just for her. I still think that “You Shall Be My Lady” is the loveliest love song of all time and its ending “you shall have love / like the autumn storms” so erotically charged that even my child's mind thrilled with it.Fiddles carved from linden wood have the sweetest sound, or so the lore goes; linden wood's fine, even grain, pale white or light brown, devoid of knots and gnarls, lends itself to easy shaping. Folk fiddles were created differently from standard violins: The body was sculpted from one piece of linden wood, rather than from separate blocks for the back and the ribs, and topped with a spruce wood plank. Sometimes even the neck was carved together with the body. The bridge stood on uneven feet, with the side supporting the D and G strings taller and resting on the body's bottom while the other side rested on the top.Linden fiddle sounds higher in register than violin, sometimes squeaky, sometimes tinkly. It warbles happily in dance music, thrums in your chest. The voice coaxed out of nature, the music of the tree released into the air, singing, singing high up into the sky where it tangles in the linden boughs reaching for the cloud. Village bands played the fiddles at harvest festivals together with a basetla—a string instrument almost as large as a cello, with a deeper sound that resonated in your bones. Together, they lifted the soul above the village roofs, above the church steeple, into the air and—however momentary in the life of an indentured peasant—happiness.On my walk home eighteen years after my encounter in the Vic Quad, I noticed the four little linden trees only the second summer we lived in our new house—we had moved in August, well past their blossoming. I had not visited Poland for all those years—trying to establish a life in Canada, I was reluctant to return and face the life I could have had in Poland.Until that day, I hadn't recognized the four rachitic trees strangled by paving stones in front of McMaster University Hodgins Engineering Building even though I had marched past them twice a day. But that hot and humid July their fragrance enveloped me—by then I had learned to recognize the tiniest molecules of the scent and could trace them like a hound-dog. I gazed at each of them in turn, thrilled that they would guide my walks home from work. But farther up the street, already in our division, a much larger surprise awaited—a mature linden tree threw a forties bungalow into a deep shade, its branches abuzz with bees and bumblebees. It stood footed in a small rectangular lawn, the tallest tree by far on this street corner. Suddenly not in a rush, I ambled toward it and lay my hand on the trunk wide enough to be circled by two people's arms, the grooved grey bark radiating the warmth of the day. Looking up, I saw that it is was taller and wider than Aunt Adela's tree and I remembered climbing and riding similar thick, gnarled branches.“Hello?” I heard a question in the greeting.I lifted turned around, my hand still on the tree. A middle-aged woman peered at me from the porch.“It's my favorite tree,” I said. “Sorry.”“It's a linden,” she said, her voice bearing a trace of an accent I couldn't place.I smiled as I walked away. Finally, a Canadian who knows her trees.Except that she wasn't. I met her again at a fundraiser for the chair of Polish language at McMaster University the following February. Nina was Polish, a Slavic languages professor at McMaster University. Educated in Warsaw, she had met her Russian–Canadian husband in Moscow, where she had been studying Russian on a student exchange in the sixties. We chatted about how we had met under her linden and she told me that when she and her husband bought the bungalow in 1978, the linden was already towering over it. She thought that it might have been planted when the house was built sometime in the late forties, making it at least eighty years old, long before either of us was born or arrived in Canada.At that Proustian moment in Vic Quad forty years ago, the smell of linden blossoms revealed my homesickness and isolation in a new country. Over the years, I have made peace with my memories and my dreams, and now, Nina's linden bestows a sliver of Poland upon my Canadian existence.In my basement library, looking for a book Nina wanted to borrow, I scan the shelf with my old Polish books, the ones that traveled with me across the Atlantic. A three-volume embossed linen set of Jan Kochanowski's writings stands among them. Also known as the Bard of Blackwood, this sixteenth-century poet was the first to use the Polish vernacular instead of Latin in his poetry and dramas. He is most famous for his tragic “Laments,” written after the death of his precocious three-year-old daughter Ursula, and for his trifles, short occasional poems about everyday objects and happenings.I pry Volume One from the tightly packed shelf. The small hardback fits lightly into my hand. I check the index, my fingertip tracing the rough pages beiged with age, and leaf to page 181.“Gościu, siądź pod mym liściem, a odpoczni sobie . . . ” I read.Traveler, come. An exhortation to rest under its leaves begins “On the Linden Tree,” a short poem first published in 1584. Set in the Polish alexandrine, a soothing rhythm of thirteen-syllable meter with a caesura after the seventh syllable, this trifle is twelve lines long. My back against the fake wood of my bookshelves, I read about a living and giving tree. My eyes follow the printed lines and I hear the Polish words clearly in my mind as if I were reading aloud.It's all there: the “cool shade” of the graceful boughs, a shelter for humans and birds alike; the buzzy bees gathering nectar from the “sweet-smelling flowers”; the honey that “graces the finest of tables”; the soft soughing of the leaves in the summer breeze that “sing (. . .) visitors” to sleep (translated by William Auld). My sight, tracing the letters on the page, transmutes into other senses as if by magic—I hear the wind, I smell the blossoms, I taste the honey, my palms twitch against the grooved bark.Poetry's magic. I am transported. All my experiences and knowledge of the linden resonate, echo in my brain, and coalesce into an ur-experience of the linden until I feel—I know—the linden in all its leafy, barky, blossomy linden-ness.