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Owen Johnson & Julian Sutton (2020)
Recommended citation
Johnson, O. & Sutton, J. (2020), 'Tilia × juranyana' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
Intermediate in features between its parents Tilia cordata and T. tomentosa.
Distribution Hungary and other parts of SE Europe where the parents grow together
Habitat Woodlands
USDA Hardiness Zone 4-7
RHS Hardiness Rating H6
A hybrid reported occasionally from the parts of Europe where Tilia cordata and T. tomentosa grow together even though T. tomentosa tends flower later. This name is very rarely seen attached to cultivated trees in Europe or North America, although there is a fine linden labelled T. × juranyana at the John A. Finch Arboretum, Spokane, Washington, planted before 1912 (Plants Map 2020). The cultivar ‘Hillieri’ probably belongs here.
T. tomentosa f. virescens, described by Späch in 1834 from a tree growing in the Trianon Garden in Paris as a form with leaves so thinly felted underneath that they appeared green, may have been of hybrid origin (Pigott 2012), though the wild population of T. tomentosa does include trees whose underleaf is much less densely tomentose than the forms familiar in gardens.
Raised in England by Hillier and Sons Nursery in the mid-20th century, ‘Hillieri’ is probably a clone of Tilia × juranyana. The leaves are densely felted underneath, but seedlings raised from the example in the Arnold Arboretum, Massachusetts, have leaves varying from densely tomentose to glabrous (Pigott 2012). ‘Hillieri’ is a handsome tree, reaching 14 m, dbh 48 cm at Talbot Manor in Norfolk by 2008 and 18 m, dbh 38 cm at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, Hampshire by 2017; the late Harry Hay’s specimen at Margery Hall Pig Farm in Surrey, however, remains poor and bushy (Tree Register 2018). ‘Hillieri’ is probably no longer commercially available. The RHS Horticultural Database unfortunately confuses it with Tilia ‘Harold Hillier’, a quite different hybrid (Royal Horticultural Society 2020).