The Black Walnuts of Nolenspark

Maastricht's Stadspark grew westward in 1886, absorbing the ground that became Monseigneur Nolenspark and Henri Hermanspark, under the design of Lievin Rosseels, son of the Leuven landscape architect Egidius Rosseels who had laid out the park's earlier southward expansion in the 1860s. This group of black walnuts, an American species grown here for its wood and its nuts rather than any native pedigree, most likely went into the ground during that same 1886 westward push, though no record fixes the planting to a specific year. The walnuts share the park with a run of other trees from the same expansion, weeping silver limes along the water, a pair of tulip trees, and the row of planes further along Van Heylerhofflaan that includes the tallest recorded plane in the Netherlands, all part of one coordinated late-19th-century planting scheme rather than separate additions over time. They stand in the open park, free, on ground that was still farmland or open country before Rosseels arrived to make it a park.