The Beech Arbour of Van Heekpark

The beech arbour of Van Heekpark contains no beech. Its Dutch name, Beukenberceau, translates straight across to beech arbour, and the tree actually doing the work is haagbeuk: hornbeam, Carpinus betulus, a different family altogether. Hornbeam gets the job on temperament. It takes hard clipping year after year and holds an architectural shape for decades, which is why gardeners across Europe reach for it whenever a tunnel has to stay a tunnel. Roughly a hundred of them stand here in two trained rows, pruned into a green corridor that serves as the main link between G.J. van Heekpark and the Van Lochemsbleekpark beside it. When it went in is genuinely unsettled. The national register of monumental trees says the park was laid out in 1917 and 1918 and that the berceau was made then. The Rijksmonument description says the berceau was built in 1929, at the south-eastern end of the Van Lochemsbleekpark woods. Nothing establishes whether those are one job described twice or a planting later extended, so both dates stay on the page. The park came out of the textile boom. Garden architect P.H. Wattez designed it for Gerrit Jan van Heek, one of the mill owners whose factories made the modern city, and van Heek handed it to the municipality in 1918. The mills are long closed. The tunnel is still clipped, and both parks have been a single national monument since 1995. This is one to walk through rather than stand in front of.