The Lime by the Mill of Piet

The register says this is the thickest lime on the bastions, which is a small crown and a well-defined one, because the bastions are a closed set. Alkmaar's walls and bastions were built in 1565, at the height of the fortification boom that preceded the revolt against Spain, and this is where the city's luck comes in: most Dutch towns pulled their earthworks down and sold the land, and Alkmaar largely did not. In 1870 Louis Paul Zocher, of the family that laid out half the parks in the country, converted the surviving works into a city park in the landscape style. Curved walks, water, planted slopes, all of it on a defensive earthwork. The lime went in at the end of the nineteenth century, so it belongs to Zocher's park rather than to the fortress. Bastion soil is a genuine advantage. It is deep, artificial and undisturbed, which is more than any street can offer, and that is part of why the biggest trees in this city are all standing on a rampart. It is near the mill called the molen van Piet. In July the flowers are heavy and the whole slope smells of them.