The ANWB Linden of Wilhelminakade

The organisation this tree was planted for was not yet fifty years old when it got its own tree, whatever the sign says. Groningen planted a line of lindens along the Wilhelminakade in 1928 to honour the ANWB, then still a cyclists' union rather than the roadside-assistance name it later became, and the register calls it the union's fiftieth anniversary. The ANWB itself dates its founding to 1883, which makes 1928 the forty fifth year, not the fiftieth. Nobody has explained the gap, and this page will not invent one. The tree itself is plainer than its arithmetic problem. It is a common lime on a street corner, healthy apart from one dead branch, its base ringed with dozens of small knobbly regrowth points where the city has repeatedly cut back suckering growth over the better part of a century. That kind of pollarding scar is usually the surest sign of a genuinely old street tree: a young one has not been cut back often enough to show it. Free to see, on the public corner of Wilhelminakade and Oranjesingel, no gate involved.