The Tulip Tree of Boerhaave

This tree exists because a London apothecary put a Virginia seed in the post. On 1 October 1716, botanist Isaac Rand shipped seed of an American species barely known in Europe to Leiden; eleven days later, on 12 October 1716, the Hortus Botanicus's own professor Herman Boerhaave sowed it in the garden that still bears the tree today. Boerhaave was not primarily a botanist. He is remembered as one of the founders of modern clinical medicine, teaching physicians from across Europe to examine patients at the bedside rather than argue from old texts, and the same instinct for direct observation over inherited authority shows up in his own tidy planting record for this tree, the reason its age is unusually certain for something three centuries old. The Hortus calls it the oldest tulip tree on the European continent, the species having only reached English cultivation in 1663 and taken decades more to spread further. Its yellow-green, cup-shaped flowers only appear once a tree reaches real maturity, easy to miss on a young specimen and unmistakable on one this size. It stands near the garden's entrance, a short walk from the Rapenburg canal, three centuries into a life that started as cargo.