The Golden Rain Tree of Aldenhofpark

It flowers in July, which is the point of it. Almost every tree in a Dutch park has finished flowering by midsummer; the golden rain tree waits, then covers itself in loose yellow panicles for weeks. What follows is stranger. The spent flowers become papery three-sided lanterns, pink turning to brown, hollow with a seed rattling inside, and they hang on well past the point where the leaves have gone orange and dropped. The Dutch call it the lampionboom, the lantern tree, and it comes from China and Korea. That is roughly why it is here: the national register of monumental trees lists it on dendrological grounds, which is the designation given to a tree that earns protection for what it is rather than for anything it has witnessed. It is also, honestly, the whole of what is known. The register puts it at about a century old and records no history for it, no girth and no height, and we found no walking route, article or archive that names a golden rain tree in Aldenhofpark. So this one is a register entry with a real tree at the end of it, standing in the north section of the park on city ground that is open at any hour. If you know its story, we would like to hear it.