The Wellingtonia of the Ledeboerpark

Somebody wrote down what this tree cost. The register cites a document in the archive of the Twente textile families: in 1866 the mill owner H. J. van Heek and the garden architect D. Wattez corresponded about the price of a Wellingtonia, itemised on an invoice for the planting around 't Wageler in 1865. Wellingtonia was the trade name the British gave the giant sequoia after the Duke of Wellington, and in the 1860s it was the most fashionable and most expensive thing you could put in a garden in Europe. The species had only been introduced to Britain in 1853. Buying one was a way of saying what you were worth. The park is what became of that estate. Wattez laid it out in the second half of the nineteenth century, the city absorbed it, and the Ledeboerpark on the Hengelosestraat is now open to anyone. So you can go and stand under an object of Victorian conspicuous consumption that has quietly outlived the mills, the family's fortune and the argument about the price. It is unmistakable: the thick red-brown trunk with soft fibrous bark, and a straight conical top.