The Atlas Cedar of the Soestdijkerstraatweg

In 1990 the street was repaved and the cedar nearly died of it. Pipes went in between the trunk and the front gardens, straight across the root plate. By 1994 the municipality was digging test pits and rebuilding the soil underneath; by the summer of 1996 the tree had recovered reasonably; in May 2005 the register's own inspector recorded it as doing only moderately, with dead and broken branches. It has been pruned hard since and stands a little out of balance because of it. All of which is what a 140 year old Atlas cedar looks like when you set it in paving on a through road. The register dates the tree to the 1880s and notes that the houses along here went up around 1900, so the cedar was standing before the street was. Cedrus atlantica comes from the Atlas mountains of Morocco and Algeria, where it grows on dry limestone at altitude and is now threatened in its own range. On the Soestdijkerstraatweg it gets the opposite of everything it evolved for: wet feet, compacted ground, road salt and services under the roots. It has managed 140 years anyway. The needles sit in tight blue-grey rosettes on short spurs and the branches leave the trunk in flat horizontal tiers you can read from across the road. The register is the only source we have found for it.