The Utrechtseweg Black Locust

Somewhere between 1810 and 1820, when the Netherlands was either a department of Napoleon's France or had just stopped being one, somebody put an American tree on the Utrechtseweg. It is still standing. That planting band, from the national monumental tree register, makes this black locust roughly 210 years old, an unusually early date for the species in this country. Robinia pseudoacacia comes from the Appalachians and reached Europe at the start of the seventeenth century, carrying the name of Jean Robin, gardener to the French king, who is credited with the first Paris specimen. It travelled because it did two useful jobs: the timber rots far more slowly than oak, and the roots fix nitrogen, which lets the tree get on with life on the poor sandy ground of this part of Gelderland. Under history the register writes nothing whatsoever. What it does record is the address: a public square owned by the city, across the road from where the PGEM electricity company kept its offices in a villa called Bellevue. The company has gone and so has the villa, and the register still uses them to say where the tree is. Old black locusts look worse than they are, all deeply grooved bark and a trunk that seems to be turning slowly on its own axis. Free, no gate, about fifteen minutes on foot from the station.