The Amstelkade Olive Willow

Despite the name, this tree is not a willow and has nothing to do with olives. The olijfwilg on Amstelkade is an Elaeagnus, a shrub-turned-tree genus with silvery, willow-shaped leaves and small fragrant flowers that ripen into fruit resembling tiny olives, hence a common name that misleads on both counts. Planted in 1948, three years after the Netherlands emerged from wartime occupation, it has grown along the Amstelkanaal into what the city's own tree inventory calls a specimen unique in the Netherlands for its combination of size and age. Nobody has documented a comparable one anywhere else in the country. At under 80 years old it is the youngest tree on this list by decades, included not for age but because Elaeagnus rarely gets the decades of undisturbed growth it takes to reach tree scale, most specimens staying shrub-sized in gardens rather than lining a public street. Amsterdam's official register of notable trees lists it among the city's most distinctive, a quiet distinction for a tree most passersby would assume was an ordinary willow if they noticed it at all.