The Cedar of Pinetum Blijdenstein

When the house came down in 1928 the land was parcelled up and sold, all of it except the walled garden, which the owner's will required to be kept. That garden is the Pinetum Blijdenstein, and this western red cedar has stood in its southeast corner since close to the beginning. Benjamin Willem Blijdenstein was an Amsterdam banker who bought six hectares here in 1880, had a villa built, and in 1898 turned the estate's walled fruit and vegetable garden into a collection of conifers. He worked on it until he died in 1914. The register dates this tree to that first period, a band that puts it at roughly 130 years old, and it names a giant sequoia from the same years standing nearby. The register is the only source we have found for it. Thuja plicata comes from the Pacific Northwest, where the coastal peoples built canoes, longhouses and totem poles out of it and where the species can pass a thousand years. Crush a spray of the flat green foliage and it smells of pineapple. The bark peels away in long fibrous strips, and the branch tips droop before turning up at the end, which is how you tell it from the cypresses around it. The paths Hendrik Copijn drew in 1909 are still broadly the ones you walk on.