The Pond Cypress of Weizigtpark

A swamp tree from the American South is quietly thriving by a Dutch park entrance, more than a century after somebody decided a cypress relative was worth the gamble. The pond cypress standing near the old coach house at Weizigtpark went into the ground somewhere between 1890 and 1900, making it over 125 years old and, according to the tree registry that tracks it, genuinely rare in the Netherlands: few pond cypresses here have had this long to grow. Unlike its swamp-dwelling relatives back home in Florida and the Carolinas, it needs no flooded ground to get through a Dutch winter, just ordinary parkland soil by the entrance path. The coach house behind it, built in 1886 to serve the estate that later became this park, is older than the tree by only a few years, so the two have effectively grown old side by side. About 350 metres away, the park's Silver Maple already stands on this list, so Weizigtpark now holds two entries from two different continents, planted decades apart by people who evidently liked their trees unusual.