The Zijpendaalseweg Lime

Almost every lime along a Dutch street is a hybrid. This one is not. Tilia cordata is the small-leaved lime, the species actually native to the Low Countries, and it stands on the Zijpendaalseweg a few hundred metres from a common lime beside the Watermuseum, which turns the walk between them into a free lesson in telling the two apart. Turn a leaf over. The small-leaved lime carries small rust-coloured tufts of hair in the angles where the veins meet, and it keeps a clean trunk, while the common lime throws up a thicket of suckers around its own ankles. The rest of what is known fits in a line. The national monumental tree register dates the planting to between 1920 and 1930, which makes it roughly a century old, and leaves the history field blank. It grew up on protected ground: Sonsbeek, Zijpendaal and Gulden Bodem are listed together as a single Rijksmonument complex of historic parkland, and this stretch of road is the seam between that parkland and the city. No source outside the register has written this tree down, so treat the 1920s band as one authority's estimate rather than a date. If you have an older photograph of this verge, we would like to see it. Free, public, about ten minutes on foot from the station.