The Common Lime of Kenaupark

This common lime is the youngest of Kenaupark's protected trees, planted in the early twentieth century, decades after the Zocher family's 1865 design had already matured into the park visitors walk today. Most of Kenaupark's oldest plantings, its plane trees and bald cypress grove, went in during the park's first years; this lime is a later addition to an already-established landscape, close enough to the original design that the register still lists it as part of the same historic planting scheme rather than treating it as a later intrusion. Common lime is itself a hybrid rather than a distinct wild species, a natural cross between the small-leaved and large-leaved lime that was the default street and park tree across Dutch cities for centuries, valued for tolerating pruning and city conditions better than most trees its size. This one grows within a hundred metres of Kenaupark's copper beech, its plane group and its bald cypresses, on ground that was open fortification earthworks within living memory of the people who first planted here. It stands in the open park, free, a few minutes' walk from Haarlem Centraal station.