The Caucasian Wingnut and Weeping Silver Lime of Waldeckpark

Two trees, ten metres apart, one stop. The Caucasian wingnut is the one that stops people: through early summer it hangs ropes of winged green seeds, the longest of them about the length of your forearm, which is not something the oaks and limes of a Dutch city park do. Neither tree stands on natural ground. Waldeckpark was laid out in 1921 on the Waldeck bastion, a piece of Maastricht's demolished fortifications, by the Haarlem landscape architect Leonard Springer, who worked in the romantic manner: a rose avenue, the old fortification ruins left standing as ornament, and specimen trees put where people would walk past them. The wingnut is recorded as part of that original scheme, and Springer planted a pair of them. Only one of the two has been located again. Beside it grows a weeping silver lime, a cultivar that builds a broad dome and then lets its outer branches hang to the ground, flashing the pale undersides of its leaves whenever the wind gets in. That one we can only find in the national monumental tree register, with no second source naming it, so it rests on thinner evidence than its neighbour. The register puts both in the 1920s, which makes them roughly a century old. They sit at the Tongerseweg edge of the park, on city land, with no gate and nothing to pay.