The Leaning Black Locust of Westerpark

Leeuwarden's own walking brochure does not lead on this tree's species. It calls it the leaning, propped-up acacia, and it mentions it twice. The tree is a black locust, white acacia in Dutch, planted in 1924 in Westerpark, the small park at the west edge of the old town that everybody here calls the Vosseparkje. It has spent a century going over sideways and is now carried by a support. That is less alarming than it sounds. Black locusts lean: the timber is famously hard and rot-resistant, the crowns grow heavy and lopsided, and old ones tilt. Nobody has published a verdict on how much longer it has, and it would be wrong to guess in either direction. The park around it was laid out in 1872 around a drinking-water reservoir the city needed rather more than it needed a park, and the acacia arrived half a century after that. Its neighbours are worth the extra five minutes: a grey poplar planted in 1909 on the east bank of the pond, and across the park a Caucasian wingnut from the Caspian forests with a trunk over a metre round. Our pin is a park-edge approximation taken from Westersingel 8. The tree itself stands inside the park, and it is the one you cannot mistake.