WALKING home on Tuesday evening after a day of heavy rain, and hard toil, I noticed the tarmac path beneath a tree was covered with what I thought were fallen leaves.

The limey-green carpet was so thick that pedestrians had gone out of their way to walk around it rather than crunch through it.

I thought it was an autumn fall brought on early by the weather, but as I neared I realised the immaculate carpet was made of blossom that had tumbled from a single lime tree that grows out of the Skerne’s banks at the foot of Priestgate in Darlington.

I had never previously associated limes with such a lovely display. In fact, I had only thought they were terrible trees because, as all motorists knew, of their honeydew. Aphids eat into their leaves to get at their sugars and then excrete a yucky substance, particularly on a hot day, which sticks to the cars and the paths beneath, and turns black when it is attacked by mould.

The word “lime” is the modern version of “linde”, the Anglo-Saxon name for the tree – nearly every town in our area (Darlington, Shildon, Aycliffe, Richmond, Ayton, Coxhoe, Consett to mention but a few) has a linden avenue or street which was built where once a wood of lindes grew.

Lime wood is good for carving and for making morris dancers sticks out of as it doesn’t splinter when thwacked, and a fibrous layer – bast – between the bark and the wood used to be stretched out and twisted into rope.

The French have a bit of a thing about limes – in the early 20th Century, a mildly sedative tea made out of lime blossoms was briefly fashionable in Parisian cafes, and in the 19th Century, a French chemist called Missa patented a chocolate-substitute he’d made by grinding up the blossom and the unripe fruits. It never caught on because it didn’t keep very well and it tasted nothing like chocolate.

Walking into work on Wednesday morning, the wind had blown the lime carpet into the river and the feet of a hundred Darlingtonians had ground the remainder into a greeny-brown dust that made the place look filthy – a typical lime tree.

BREXIT continues to test the English language. Boris Johnson sailed into the debate with a nautical expression when he said the EU could go whistle for its money. Sailors believed whistling was the “devil’s music” because it could summon up a gale, and so they only whistled when they were becalmed and desperate. Landlubbers knew this was an impossible superstition, and so “to whistle for something” means “you ain’t going to get it”.

Nautical expressions are ok, but Conservative MP Anne-Marie Morris has been suspended from her party for using a racist one to indicate a hidden snag in the negotiations. In 1840s America, there was an “underground railroad” which secretly ferried black slaves out of the slave-owning states to freedom in the north. One of the ways of escape was to conceal a slave inside a wagonload of fire timber, and that gives rise to the expression Ms Morris used.

This, though, is one of the politer derivations and doesn’t even take into account the offensiveness of the n-word. Even though language is evolving rapidly, it remains extremely powerful.