The Caucasian Wingnut of Vosseparkje

An ice storm in March 1987 damaged this wingnut badly enough that the scar is still visible behind an old branch, and decades on it is one of two enormous trees flanking the path where Vosseparkje opens onto Molenstraat. The Caucasian wingnut is native to forests around the Caspian Sea, thousands of kilometres from Friesland. Leeuwarden's own specimen has grown a trunk 130 centimetres round, a figure the national tree register does not even record: it comes from a walking-tour pamphlet published by the city's own historical centre, which found the tree standing beside a second, gold-leaved companion nobody has identified yet. The park itself dates to 1872, laid out by garden architect Gerrit Vlaskamp around a drinking-water reservoir the city needed more than it needed a park, and the wingnut went in a generation later, sometime between 1900 and 1910. It has outlived the reservoir's original purpose, the ice storm, and watched the technical school built beside the park in 1936 grow old itself. Two sources place it slightly differently, one at the Molenstraat path junction and one on the park's west side, close enough that this reads as one tree rather than two, but worth a second look on the ground.