The Bald Cypress of Geer Boogerd

A swamp tree from the American South outlived the psychiatric hospital that once surrounded it. The Sint-Jorisgasthuis stood on this ground for close to 150 years under its older name, Binnengesticht, rebuilt in the 1920s and finally demolished in the 1960s to make way for housing. Its bald cypress, planted somewhere between 1910 and 1920 in what was then the institution's large garden, is one of the few things on the site that survived the building coming down around it. Bald cypresses are conifers that behave like broadleaf trees, dropping their needles every autumn, which is unusual enough among cone-bearing species that Delft's specimen stands out on a small square that gives no other hint of what stood here for a century and a half. In its native range along the Mississippi and the Gulf coast it grows in standing water and throws up woody knees around its base; on a Dutch street corner it just grows tall. At around 110 years old, it is the youngest of Delft's newly registered trees and the only witness left to a building nobody living remembers walking into.