The Date-plum of the Hortus

Children call this one the Halloween tree, and the holes in its trunk have a stranger history than the nickname suggests. Late in the 19th century a maple seeded itself inside the trunk of the date-plum and grew there. Nobody took it out for roughly forty years, until 1931, and the cavities it left behind were then packed with concrete. Another forty years passed before the tree surgeons at Copijn removed that concrete again, which is how the openings you can see today came to exist. Iron pins were fitted inside what was left of the trunk to hold it together, and they are still doing that work. The national monumental tree register dates the tree to 1740, which would make it the second oldest in the Hortus Botanicus after the tulip tree Herman Boerhaave sowed in 1716. Its recorded planting band is wider, 1700 to 1750, so read the age as somewhere between 275 and 325 years in the same bed. Date-plums are either male or female, and this is a male, so it never fruits. The blue-black fruit the species is named for hangs on a younger female specimen the garden keeps in the fern garden instead. This tree offers a hollow trunk held up by ironmongery and a nickname it earned honestly.