Lime Honey and Linden Honey: The Same Honey, Two Names

This is one of the most common sources of confusion in the honey world, and it is entirely down to language. The Tilia tree is native right across the Northern Hemisphere, and different regions simply named it differently. The honey never changed. Only the label did.

We sell this honey, and because we are a British brand you will find it on our shelves as Linden, the name most widely recognised, even though a British botanist would happily call the tree a lime. So if you arrived here searching for lime honey, you have found it.

One tree, three names

The tree behind this honey belongs to the genus Tilia. The species that matters most for honey in our part of Europe is the small-leaved lime, Tilia cordata, a tree whose native range runs from Britain across the continent to Romania and the Caucasus and which can live for several centuries, according to the European forest genetics programme EUFORGEN. Its close relative, the large-leaved lime, is told apart by the tufts of hair in its leaf veins. Wherever these trees grow, people gave them a local name, and the honey inherited whichever name was local.

One more distinction worth knowing, because it trips up buyers on the continent: some honeys sold as linden, particularly in Germany, are honeydew honeys, gathered by bees from the sugary secretions of insects feeding on the lime tree's leaves rather than from the blossom. They are darker, higher in minerals and taste quite different, and researchers characterise them separately from blossom linden, as a 2025 study of linden honeydew honey sets out. Everything on this page, and the jar we sell, is the blossom kind: pale, herbal and made from Tilia nectar.

So when you see lime honey, linden honey, basswood honey or the botanical Tilia honey, you are looking at four labels for one product. The species of Tilia can vary between regions, but the character of the honey stays recognisably the same.

What lime, or linden, honey tastes like

It is pale, often with a faint green tint when fresh, and its flavour is far bigger than that delicate colour suggests. Expect something fresh and herbal, with cool woody and minty notes and a lingering aftertaste that sets it apart from sweeter, rounder honeys. That is not just our palate talking: a 2025 trained-panel study of linden honeys from six regions described the reference sample as medium sweet, minty, with a long, gently astringent aftertaste, setting into a compact mass of fine, light-yellow crystals, sometimes with a green tint, published in the journal Foods. The same study notes the local rule that a honey may only be sold as monofloral linden if at least 30 percent of its pollen comes from Tilia.

That cool, herbal character is why linden honey is so often reached for as a honey to stir into a hot drink: it has enough personality to be tasted through tea rather than vanishing into it, which is why it anchors our Tea Lover's selection. It is also why it stands slightly apart from the rounder, sweeter honeys like acacia. If you would like to see where it sits among the others, our guide to the different types of raw honey lays them out side by side.

A honey that sets, and why that is right

Genuine raw linden honey is runny when fresh and then crystallises over a few months into a smooth, pale, fine-grained set. This is normal and expected. In fact, with this honey it is a useful authenticity signal: a pale honey sold as linden that never sets at all has very likely been processed to keep it that way, which is the core difference our guide to raw versus regular honey gets into. Our guide to 생꿀이 결정화되는 이유 explains the pattern, the science behind the solid state covers the chemistry, and to soften a set jar you simply stand it closed in warm water no hotter than 40 degrees.

Three signs you are holding genuine linden. The colour: pale, near-white to light amber, often with that faint green tint. The aroma: fragrant with a fresh, almost balsamic lift that no other pale honey quite has. The set: fine-grained and smooth within a few months, never coarse and never absent. A study of two Romanian linden honeys found them slightly higher in water and moderately acidic compared with darker honeys, as reported in a 2025 physico-chemical analysis, which is part of why the crystals form so finely.

Common questions