The Sweet Birch of the Oosterbegraafplaats

Snap a twig off this birch and it smells of wintergreen, sharp and sweet, the same oil that once flavoured birch beer and root beer before chemists learned to make it without bark. That is where the name comes from: Betula lenta is sweet birch, one of the few trees whose common name describes a smell rather than a look. The Bomenstichting register lists it here on dendrological grounds, the same reason it gives for the Hungarian oak, the sweet gum and the Oriental spruce standing nearby in the same cemetery: a fine, uncommon specimen rather than a documented age. This one carries a substantial trunk for its species, measured at 2.34 metres round and about 18 metres tall, a figure an independent count of the cemetery's trees agrees with. Neither record gives a planting date. Sweet birch's native range is the Appalachians and the hardwood forests of the eastern United States, where its sap was once tapped and boiled down much like a sugar maple's, for a syrup that tastes faintly of mint. In Enschede it stands towards the back of the northern main path of a rijksmonument cemetery laid out in 1899, the fourth tree from this one corner of ground to earn a place on the national register. If anyone knows when it was planted, we would like to hear it.