The Trumpet Tree of Wilhelminapark

This catalpa grew sideways instead of up, and Breda decided to help it keep doing so. It leans out over the pond in Wilhelminapark, a park laid out in 1894 by landscape architect Leonard A. Springer, far enough over the water that the municipality now props its lowest limbs on columns rather than let them snap or drag. Local tradition credits Queen Wilhelmina herself, the park's namesake, with intervening at some point to see the tree preserved rather than felled for convenience, though the story's exact origin is harder to pin down than the tree's current, very visible lean. Catalpas are not native to the Netherlands, brought from the southeastern United States as an ornamental species prized for its huge heart-shaped leaves and its white, purple-throated flower spikes in midsummer, and this one has had well over a century in Dutch soil to develop the sprawling, horizontal habit the species is capable of when nothing stops it. No exact planting record survives, so its age is inferred from the park's own founding date rather than documented outright. Wilhelminapark itself has lost several of its other historic trees in recent years to disease and storm damage, which makes this one's continued, actively supported survival more notable rather than less.