The Caucasian Wingnut of Frederika van Pruisenweg

A wingnut on a residential verge is an odd choice, which is the point. The Villapark district went up from 1907 as a garden suburb built for Philips executives, and whoever planted its streets reached past the ordinary lime and plane for something a passer-by would not recognise: Pterocarya fraxinifolia, native to the Caucasus and Iran, a relative of the walnut whose true claim to fame is a chain of winged seed pods that hangs off the branches like a string of pale green fish, sometimes half a metre long, through late summer. The national monumental tree register and the city's own street-tree survey agree on the species and land within two metres of each other on where it stands, both pointing to a planting around 1910. Neither source records a girth. It grows on Frederika van Pruisenweg, one street over from the district's chestnuts and its pin oak, all part of the same deliberate planting that turned a stretch of Philips-era Eindhoven into an outdoor collection of trees nobody expected to find on a Dutch street.