The Oriental Spruce of the Oosterbegraafplaats

Nobody has dated this spruce, and age is not why it is protected. The Bomenstichting listed it on dendrological grounds: Picea orientalis is a tree of the Caucasus and the mountains of northeast Turkey, uncommon in this corner of the Netherlands, and this is a good one. It is the easiest spruce in Europe to identify by hand. Oriental spruce carries the shortest needles of any spruce, blunt at the tip rather than sharp, dark and glossy and packed tight all round the shoot, so the whole tree reads denser and blacker than the Norway spruces Dutch planters reached for by default. In its own range it covers the wet Black Sea slopes in forest up to the tree line. Here it stands in a cemetery on the eastern edge of Enschede, about fifty metres from a Hungarian oak, in ground laid out as a memorial park in 1899 and now a national monument. How it got here is not written down. The register's age field says unknown, and rather than put a number on it we have left it empty: a spruce can look venerable at eighty and ordinary at two hundred, and guessing would be the easy kind of dishonesty. If you know when this one went in, or have seen a planting record for the northern section, tell us and we will date it properly.