The Nootka Cypress of the Protestant Cemetery

Botanists have moved this species between genera more than once and are not obviously finished. Older books file it as Chamaecyparis nootkatensis, newer ones as Cupressus nootkatensis, and a few as Xanthocyparis. In Dutch it is simply the nootkacipres, and nobody argues about that. Wherever it is filed, it comes from a long way off. Its home range is the Pacific coast of North America, from Alaska down through British Columbia, on cold wet slopes above the sea. This one grows in a Protestant burial ground on the eastern edge of Helmond, the better part of eight thousand kilometres from there. Its age is a blank, and unusually the register says so outright. The Dutch national register normally gives at least a planting decade; for this tree it records leeftijd onbekend, age unknown, and marks the entry as less certain than most. So there is no number on this page and we are not going to invent one. What is dated is the ground under it. The Protestant cemetery has been at Molenstraat 70a since 1865, and the parish that runs it opens the gates from sunrise to sunset, free, every day. It is a separate burial ground from the general cemetery at number 72 a few paces along the same street, where the weeping beech and the silver maple on this page stand. If anyone knows when this cypress was planted, that is the missing line.