The Ash of the Oostpoort

The gate is the famous one, but the ash on the lawn beside it is no medieval relic: the national register of monumental trees puts its planting between 1880 and 1890, centuries after the gate itself was built. That band makes the tree about 140 years old, give or take a decade, and it is the only date anybody has published for it. It stands on a small municipal lawn by the canal at the Oostpoort quay, a plantsoen in the register's own word, listed as open to visit and visible from the path. The register records it as a single tree and says nothing about who planted it or why. Surviving this long as an ash is its own small achievement. Ash dieback, a fungus that reached Europe in the 1990s, has been killing ashes across the continent, the Netherlands included. The most recent aerial photograph shows the crowns on this lawn still in leaf. One honest caveat. The register's pin falls between two trees on the lawn, one a few metres south-west and one a little further north, and nobody has yet said which of them is the ash. If you stand there, the leaves settle it: an ash carries its leaflets in opposite pairs along a single stalk. Tell us which one it is, and send a photograph if you take one.