The Rijksmuseum Wingnut

The Rijksmuseum's own architect planted this tree in his own garden design, and it outlived every renovation the museum went through afterward. Pierre Cuypers, who designed the Rijksmuseum building itself, laid out its surrounding gardens between 1884 and 1916 in distinct historical styles, neo-Renaissance parterres beside a wild landscape garden, and planted a Caucasian wingnut near the director's villa in the southeast corner around 1907. By a 2014 survey the tree stood over 19 meters tall with a trunk more than four meters around. When the museum closed for a decade-long renovation completed in 2013, the landscape firm Copijn redesigned the gardens from scratch and could have cleared the site for something new. Instead the wingnut was kept and built around, one of the few mature trees preserved through the entire project. Wingnuts are still uncommon as full-grown specimens in the Netherlands, which puts this tree in the same small company as the ones in Wertheimpark and Amstelveld across town, three separate stands of the same species that all happened to reach old age inside Amsterdam's public gardens rather than getting cleared for something newer.