The Tulip Tree of J.C. Jacobsens Have

For most of its life this tree stood in a private garden belonging to a brewer. J.C. Jacobsen, who founded Carlsberg, put a tree collection in behind the brewery and kept it; the public was let in in 2009. The tulip tree is the pick of what he left. The Danish register measured it in 2019 at 3.92 metres round and 26.5 metres tall, a single healthy stem on the western lawn toward the northwest. It is a magnolia relative from the eastern United States and it carries two oddities you can check from the ground. The leaves look as though somebody took the point off each one with scissors, cut square across the tip. The flowers are green and orange and genuinely tulip-shaped, and they open high in the crown in June, where hardly anybody notices them. What everybody notices is October, when the crown turns a clear yellow. The tulip tree is one of the most dependable autumn trees grown in this climate, and at 26.5 metres there is a great deal of it to turn. Nobody has dated this one. The garden's history is documented; the tree's planting year is not. If you know it, tell us.