The Holly of the Castle Park

This is the one tree in the castle park you will have to hunt for, and the register says so itself: it marks the holly as not visible from any path. Holly is a strange thing to find on a monumental tree register at all. It is usually a shrub, it grows slowly, and at seventy-five to eighty-five years old this one is nowhere near the bulk of the maple, the lime or the two chestnuts around it. The register protected it anyway, and it wrote down a different reason for doing so. Every other tree in these grounds is listed as monumentaal. This one is listed as dendrologisch, a botanical specimen rather than a landmark. What it does not say is which botanical quality earned the listing. Its history field for this entry is a single word: onbekend. Unknown. The date is the other thing worth knowing. The band runs 1940 to 1950, which puts the planting somewhere across the war and the years directly after it. Nothing else on this page went in that late. Holly is dioecious, so only a female plant carries the red berries everyone associates with it. Nobody has recorded which this is. If you get there in December and find berries, tell us and we will write it down.