The Hornbeam of Krayenhoffpark

This hornbeam stands close enough to Krayenhoffpark's giant sequoia to be mistaken for an afterthought planted in the famous tree's shadow, but it is roughly the same age and belongs to a species the Dutch have grown for a very different reason. Where the sequoia was an imported curiosity, hornbeam is a native workhorse, historically clipped into hedges and avenues across the Low Countries because it tolerates hard pruning and holds its dead brown leaves through winter, giving a bare hedge some cover even in the coldest months. The register dates this one to somewhere around 1900 to 1910, planted while the Biezen neighbourhood around it was still going up to house railway workers from the nearby yards. Left to grow naturally rather than clipped, as this one has been, hornbeam reaches a modest, broad-crowned shape closer to a beech than to the tight hedge most people picture. It grows a few metres from the park's sequoia, free, in the same small green space that gives an otherwise unremarkable railway district its one patch of shade older than most of the houses around it.