The X-factor Wingnut of the Plantsoen

In 2009 Leiden held a public vote to decide which of its trees had the X-factor. This one won with 160 votes. The runner-up, a copper beech, got 83. The contest was run by the Bomenstichting together with the VSB-fonds, De Groene Stad and the Koninklijk Nederlandsche Heidemaatschappij, and alderman John Steegh turned up to honour the winner formally. The margin is the part worth noticing: nearly two to one against a copper beech, which is the kind of tree that normally wins these things. A Caucasian wingnut earns it. It is a relative of the walnut from the forests between the Black Sea and the Caspian, large and fast growing, with pinnate leaves long enough to look tropical and chains of winged nutlets that hang off the branches through late summer like green rope. Nothing else in the Plantsoen looks remotely like it. The register dates its planting to the 1880s, roughly 140 years ago, which puts it a few decades younger than the park. The Plantsoen was laid out between 1835 and 1842 on Leiden's old city bulwarks, an English landscape park designed by Salomon van der Paauw and built in part to give unemployed men work. No girth has been published for this tree. If you take a tape to it, we will add the number.