The Beverboom of Park Leeuwenstein

Park Leeuwenstein is what is left of a demolished mansion's garden, and this magnolia is what is left of its exotic specimen trees. Villa Leeuwenstein went up in the mid-1800s and came down in 1958, too dilapidated to save, but the trees its owners planted around it kept growing after the house did not. A storm on 18 January 2018 took the park's giant sequoia and a swamp cypress in one night, leaving this tree, the beverboom, as the park's oldest surviving specimen. Beverboom is old Dutch for magnolia, specifically for Magnolia virginiana, though the exact species growing here has not been confirmed. A 2023 local survey of the park still listed a cucumber magnolia, Magnolia acuminata, among its special trees, and it may be the same tree the national register pins here by coordinate rather than by name. Acuminata flowers greenish yellow after its leaves open in late spring; virginiana flowers cream white and fragrant in early summer. A photograph at flowering time would settle it. Whichever it is, the register dates the planting to the 1880s, roughly 140 years, a specimen tree that has already outlived the house it was planted beside and two of its own neighbours.