The Ginkgo of the Bolwerken

De Bolwerken is Haarlem's older green ring, laid out from 1828 by JD Zocher when the city's fortifications came down and needed a public use, decades before his son helped design Kenaupark a couple of hundred metres east. Most of the park's planting is contemporary with that 1828 design. This ginkgo is not: the register dates it to the 1910s, arriving on the lawn at the foot of a low rise nearly a century after Zocher laid the paths around it, a later addition to an already-mature landscape rather than part of the original planting. Ginkgo biloba is one of the oldest tree lineages alive, unrelated to any other living tree family, which is part of why parks of this period liked to add one: a curiosity that had outlived the dinosaurs long before anyone thought to plant it in a Dutch park. Standing alone on open lawn rather than grouped like the beeches and oaks nearby, it has had space and light a crowded planting would not have given it. It sits between the Noorderbrug and the Kruisweg crossing, a free, open stretch of park about ten minutes from Haarlem Centraal, and a natural extension of a walk that already takes in the Kenaupark cluster a short distance away.