The Bald Cypresses of Kenaupark

Six bald cypresses grow together on the lowest, wettest ground in Kenaupark, and that placement is not an accident. Taxodium distichum is one of the few conifers that tolerates standing water, native to swamps across the southeastern United States, and whoever planted this group at the end of the nineteenth century clearly knew the species well enough to put it exactly where an ordinary tree would struggle. Grouping conifers this way was a habit of the Zocher family, the father-and-son landscape architects who designed Kenaupark in 1865 on the site of Haarlem's demolished fortifications, with the villas around the park going up in the years immediately after. The register lists the six as a single monumental entry rather than six separate trees, treating the grove as the thing worth protecting rather than any one trunk within it, the same logic behind the Kenaupark plane group and copper beech nearby. Bald cypress sheds its needles every autumn despite being a conifer, one of the few in temperate gardens that does, so the low ground it occupies goes from green to rust orange for a few weeks before going bare. It stands in the open park, free, a few steps from the existing Kenaupark copper beech and its neighbouring plane grove.