The Tulip Tree of Meezenbroek

This tulip tree grows in the park built around the Meezenbroek ponds before the Second World War, in a district that started life in the 1920s as De Voorzorg, a colony of housing built for the miners working Heerlen's coal seams. The register bands its planting to 1930-1940, putting it at roughly 90 years, a near contemporary of the park itself. Liriodendron tulipifera is North American, not European, and its name undersells the spectacle: the flowers it produces from early summer are cup-shaped, greenish yellow with an orange band inside, more like a stylised magnolia than a tulip, and easy to miss from below because they open high in the crown facing upward. The leaves are the more reliable giveaway, four-lobed and squared off at the tip as if cut with scissors, turning a clean butter yellow in autumn. A former mining colony with a purpose-built park is not the setting most people imagine for an American forest tree, and that mismatch is most of what makes it worth a detour. The register is the only source that has described it. If you know more about when or why it was planted, tell us.