The Tulip Tree of Cantonspark

Baarn already has a grove of tulip trees at Kasteel Groeneveld, sixty of them racing each other skyward. This one stands alone, by Cantonspark's main entrance on Abel Tasmanlaan, a few paces from the park's giant sequoia, and it has had the easier life of the two: the Netherlands' own monumental tree register describes its crown as well kept and its trunk as sound, marked only by a few old insect exit holes in the bark and a small, healed wound at ground level. It went in the same decade as its sequoia neighbour, somewhere between 1910 and 1920, when Cantonspark was still the private garden the industrialist August Janssen laid out behind his house Schoonoord. Liriodendron tulipifera is an American import and a relative of magnolia, named for the orange and green, tulip-shaped flowers a mature specimen produces, usually so high in the canopy that most visitors only ever find the fallen ones. This tree has had over a century to reach flowering size. Cantonspark itself passed from Janssen's estate to Utrecht University's botanical garden, then to Baarn's municipality in 1987 for one guilder, on condition its planting survive the handover intact. It has been free and open ever since, and every part of the park now carries Rijksmonument protection. The register flags this tree specifically for how visible it is to the public and how rare its species still is in the region, tucked right where most visitors first walk in.