The Plane of the Walhuis Garden

De Rijp was a whaling and herring town on an island in a lake, and it got rich enough that the merchants' warehouses still stand. This plane grows in the garden of the museum of Jan Boon junior, the last of a family of shipowners and traders. The museum occupies the Walhuis, a former warehouse of 1725, which stands behind what was Jan Boon's house. A merchant family, a warehouse, a house, a garden, and then nobody left to inherit any of it, which is how a private house becomes a museum. The tree is later than the buildings, banded 1880 to 1890, so it belongs to the last generation of the family rather than to the trading years. A plane in a small town garden grows differently from one on a boulevard. There is no competition and no pruning regime, so it spreads rather than reaching, and after a century and a half it tends to be far too large for the plot, which is exactly the effect worth going for. De Rijp itself is worth the trip regardless. Wooden houses, a seventeenth century town hall, and a street pattern that has not moved.