The Black Alder of the Sculpture Garden

Old alders are rare in the Netherlands for a mundane reason: they usually grow beside a ditch or a pond, and a farmer or a water board cuts them back every few years to keep the bank clear. This one escaped that fate because it grew inside a royal garden instead of next to a drainage canal. It stands on the bank of the pond in the Beeldentuin, the sculpture garden tucked into the grounds of Paleis Het Loo, several stems leaning low over the water near the old tea pavilion. Cut into alder wood and it turns from pale cream to a deep orange within minutes, which is why the timber was once prized for clogs and for piles driven into permanently wet ground, since it barely rots underwater. This tree has never been cut for either. Bomenbieb, the Dutch tree-recording site, dates its planting to around 1920, making it roughly a century old, a comparative youngster on this page next to oaks planted with the palace avenues. Its age is not really the point. What it shows is what an alder becomes left alone: not the stubby, repeatedly pollarded shape of a working streamside tree, but a full, spreading, multi-stemmed specimen, which is what the species can do and rarely gets the chance to.