The Ash by the Tea House

The register calls this a very impressive specimen of the species and then adds, in the same breath, that its crown has developed one-sidedly because of the park trees standing next to it. Both are true and the second explains the first. A tree that grows up hemmed in on one side puts everything it has into the open side, so you end up with an asymmetric crown reaching out over the path or the water, which reads as dramatic rather than damaged. Roodbaard's successors planted a park; the trees then negotiated among themselves. It stands on the bank by the Theekoepel, the tea house, in the Noorderplantage end of the grounds, and the register bands it 1870 to 1880. An ash of that age is worth stopping for now more than it was twenty years ago. Ash dieback, a fungal disease that arrived in the Netherlands in 2010, has killed a large share of the country's ash in the years since, and a tolerant mature tree is no longer an ordinary thing. A minority resist it, apparently on genetics rather than luck, and every big healthy one left is a candidate. Black buds in winter, in opposite pairs. Nothing else here has them.