The Tree of Heaven of Lunetteplein

Almost every tree of heaven in Europe today is a volunteer nobody planted. This one was chosen. Ailanthus altissima came out of China in the middle of the eighteenth century as a fashionable garden exotic, and it was still being planted for ornament when this one went in between 1880 and 1890. Then it turned out to do things the nurseries had not advertised. It grows a metre or more a year, seeds by the thousand, throws suckers from any severed root, and loads the soil around it with a compound that holds other species back. It is now one of the most aggressively invasive trees on the continent, at home in railway sidings, demolition plots and cracks in walls. So a deliberately planted specimen of about 140 years, standing on a public square in a Hanseatic town, is an odd survivor: ornamental planting from the years before anyone knew what the species would become. The register knows nothing else about it. Species, owner, planting decade, and then the history field reads unknown. If you know how this tree came to be on the Lunetteplein, tell us and it goes on the page. It stands in the open, a quarter of an hour on foot from Zutphen station.