The Julianaboom

Leeuwarden's official list of its ten most special trees includes one that people now living watched go into the ground. A photograph from 1948 shows alderman M.H. Geerts with a spade in front of the double gateway of the Boshuisen Gasthuis. The lime he is planting is still there, in the same rectangular bed in the north-west corner of the Jacobijnerkerkhof, and it carries the name of Princess Juliana. The country was three years out of the German occupation. The city planted a tree for the heir to the throne and had the alderman photographed doing it. At 78 it is young for a register that mostly deals in centuries, and the national register does carry it: a Hollandse linde at this coordinate, planting band 1940 to 1950, which is about as close to a countersignature on the 1948 date as a register gets. Behind it stands the gateway of the Boshuisen Gasthuis, an almshouse founded in 1652 by Anna van Eysinga, which makes the lime by nearly three centuries the newest thing on the corner. The Jacobijnerkerk takes up the rest of the square. Two limes, two queens, fifty years and a few hundred metres apart, and both still standing.