The Shellbark Hickory of the Hortus

The Dutch tree foundation calls this the oldest shellbark hickory in the Netherlands. The city of Amsterdam records it as planted in 1950, which would rule that out. Both are describing the same tree in the same corner of the Hortus, and they disagree by thirty-eight years: the Bomenstichting guide gives 1912, the municipal register N1768 gives 1950 along with a trunk 251 centimetres around. Nothing available settles it, so the honest age is somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred and fifteen years, and the claim to be the country's oldest only stands under the earlier date. The species is not in doubt, and it barely exists here. Shellbark hickory comes from the wet river bottoms of the American Midwest, is a close relative of the pecan, and drops round nuts inside a thick green husk that looks poisonous and is not: the kernel is sweet and takes real work to reach. The bark is where the name comes from, peeling off the trunk in long curling plates that stay attached at both ends. Crush a leaf and it smells sharply of walnut. A few paths away stands a Turkish hazel that the same foundation calls the oldest and thickest in the country, so this corner of the Plantage has a habit of holding records it cannot quite prove. Entry needs a Hortus ticket.