Juliana's Trumpet Tree

In April 1973 a storm knocked this catalpa flat in the grounds of Paleis Soestdijk, and Queen Juliana told her gardener to leave it exactly where it fell. The roots held. Rather than dying, the tree kept growing sideways, and new vertical trunks rose up along its horizontal length, the way a fallen willow sometimes resprouts. Guides at the palace gardens still point visitors to what they simply call the fallen trumpet tree, a catalpa planted around 1870 that turned storm damage into its main attraction. Trumpet trees rarely age gracefully in the Dutch climate. Their root systems tend to stay shallow, and mature specimens often topple in exactly this way. Most get cleared afterwards. This one got a royal reprieve instead, and half a century on it still flowers white in July from a trunk that runs along the ground rather than up from it. The palace garden charges a small entry fee and opens Friday to Sunday. Past the flower garden Juliana kept for herself is this: a tree that fell over and simply refused to stop growing.