The Jakoba Mulder Tulip Tree

Jakoba Mulder helped design the Amsterdamse Bos, and then somebody planted a tree inside it in her honour. She lived another fifty years to watch it grow. Mulder was born in Breda in 1900 and worked as an architect and town planner. The forest, originally called the Boschplan, was laid out slowly between 1934 and 1970 on polder ground southwest of the city, and the stretch this tree stands in lies in Amstelveen. The national register puts the planting at around 1938 and records that the tulip tree was reportedly her favourite of the lot. She died in Amsterdam in 1988, by which time the forest was nearly finished and the tree was half a century old. It has grown into the specimen you would want as a memorial: whole, evenly proportioned, no lost limbs, nothing much wrong with it. Tulip trees come from the eastern American forests, and the leaf gives them away, shaped as though somebody snipped the tip off square. The flowers open high in the crown in June, greenish-orange and genuinely tulip-shaped, and most people pass underneath without once looking up. By late October the whole crown goes clear butter-yellow. You can see it from the cycle path, south of the Bosbaanweg at the edge of the playing field. Only the register describes it in any detail, so if you know more, tell us.