The Falckplantsoen Pagoda Tree

In August this tree covers itself in white flowers, weeks after every lime and chestnut in the city has finished. The Japanese pagoda tree is a legume from Korea and China, with fine pinnate leaves and a crown that goes wide rather than tall, and late summer flowering is the reason people plant it. It has the room to spread because a canal was filled in. The Falckstraat was named in 1870 after a prominent Amsterdammer and is unusually broad for the centre, because it was laid over a stretch of the Achtergracht filled in around 1869. A filled canal leaves a generous street, a generous street leaves root space, and root space is how a crown this wide ended up thriving on a corner of the Reguliersgracht. Its age is genuinely unsettled. The register gives the planting band in two places and gives it differently, once as the 1890s and once as the 1900s, so the honest answer is somewhere between 116 and 136 years. The trunk carries a large wound on its south side, partly grown over, and the city prunes the heavy overhanging limbs on a schedule to keep the crown in balance. A second, smaller pagoda tree stands beside it. Free, on the street corner, and worth timing. For most of the year it is a good tree with unusual foliage. In August it is the reason to be standing there.