The Weeping Silver Limes of Haet ende Nijt

Haet ende Nijt, Hate and Envy, is the pointedly named moated monument at the heart of Stadspark's western reach, and when Lievin Rosseels redesigned this stretch of the park in 1886 he deliberately removed the five-sided earthen bank that had partly enclosed it, so that the monument would sit fully surrounded by water and read more clearly from the paths around it. This group of weeping silver limes grows along that same bank, planted a little earlier, the register dates them to the 1860s, during the park's first southward expansion rather than the later westward one. Weeping silver lime is a cultivated, downward-branching form of the ordinary silver lime, its leaves silvery on the underside and prone to catching wind in a way that makes the whole canopy shimmer, a trait 19th-century park designers prized enough to plant it beside water on purpose. The trees stand in the open along the bank, free, one stop among several from the same era, the black walnuts and tulip trees a short walk further into the same park.