The Sweet Gum of the Oosterbegraafplaats

This tree is on the national register for being a good example of its species, not an old one. The Bomenstichting dates the planting to around 1935, give or take five years, and listed it on dendrological grounds: a fine sweet gum, in a country where the species is a garden import rather than a native. Liquidambar styraciflua comes from the wet bottomlands of the American southeast. What it does in autumn is the whole reason anyone plants it here. The leaves are shaped like five-pointed stars and they refuse to turn one colour: scarlet, plum, orange and green show up on the same branch, sometimes on the same leaf, and the display runs on for weeks after the limes and beeches around it have gone brown and let go. It stands on the second stretch of the northern main path, in a cemetery that calls itself a memorial park and means it. Gedenkpark De Ooster opened in 1899 and is now a national monument, protected in part for the trees along its paths, which is how an American swamp tree ends up growing old in Twente with nothing much asked of it. Only the tree register names this specimen individually, so the planting date is its estimate rather than a documented year.