The Wertheimpark Wingnut

This tree has outlasted the park's own name twice. Wertheimpark was laid out in 1812 and named for the Jewish philanthropist Abraham Carel Wertheim in 1898, a year after his death. In August 1942 Amsterdam's Nazi-appointed mayor renamed it Parktuin to erase the connection, and the wartime name lasted until liberation restored the original in May 1945. The wingnut, a Caucasian species with broad horizontal branches that thicken into plank-like ribs to support their own weight, was already forty years old by the time any of that happened. It now spreads a canopy 24 meters across in a park barely three-quarters of a hectare in size, one of roughly fifteen trees here over a century old. Since 1993 the park has also held Gebroken Spiegels, Amsterdam's memorial to Dutch victims of the Holocaust, and the annual remembrance ceremony takes place within sight of the tree's crown. The municipality classified the wingnut as a monumental tree in 2002, a smaller but no less deliberate act of naming than the ones the park itself went through.