The Honey Locust of the Stadspaviljoen

This honey locust stands more than twenty-four metres tall, which the species almost never manages in the Netherlands. Gleditsia triacanthos is an American tree from the Mississippi basin, planted in European cities for its fine feathery leaflets and its indifference to bad air, and it usually stops well short of that height here. Eindhoven's tree survey files this one in its top band, above twenty-four metres. The national register lists it on dendrological grounds, which is a register saying the tree earns its protection for what it is rather than for anything that happened to it. Its age is disputed. The register bands the planting between 1890 and 1900, which would make it about 130 years old. The city's record says 1940, which would make it 86. Nobody has reconciled the two and we are not going to pick one for them. It stands behind the Stadspaviljoen, once the coach house of Landgoed Den Elzent. The tobacco manufacturer H.F.C. Coolen sold that estate in 1876 to the Amsterdam merchant B.H.A. Sinkel, who had Leonard Springer lay the grounds out as a landscape garden. Eindhoven opened them to the public in 1921 and named the place Stadswandelpark ten years later. The corner is a group rather than a single specimen: beeches, pin oaks, black locusts and a sweet chestnut a few steps away, all of them monumental in the city's records.