This tree is almost exactly as old as the idea of a public park in this country.
Ancient Trees in the Prinsentuin
Leeuwarden, Netherlands
Leeuwarden's Prinsentuin was laid out between 1822 and 1824 on the site of the city's former fortifications, making it close to the oldest public park in the Netherlands, and five of its oldest trees are old enough to remember that opening.
Its horse chestnut, banded by the national monumental tree register to 1820 and 1830, is almost exactly as old as the park itself. A European beech stands by the Pier Pander Temple, a small classical building put up in 1924 to hold the work of the Frisian sculptor born in 1864 to a rag merchant's family and remembered here for the talent that got him out of it. A second beech grows behind Tresoar, the Frisian historical and literary archive, keeping company with a language that has spent centuries arguing over its own literature. An ash by the park's tea house carries a crown the register itself calls one-sided, the shape a tree gets when the trees standing next to it crowd out the light on one side and not the other. And a Canadian poplar nearby has a trunk so deeply grooved and studded with fist and head sized burrs that it reads more like rock than wood. All five stand in a park that has never charged admission.
Autumn colour
There is a small classical temple in this park, built in 1924 to hold the work of one sculptor.
Autumn colour
It stands next to the building where Friesland keeps its memory.
The register calls this a very impressive specimen of the species and then adds, in the same breath, that its crown has developed one-sidedly because of the park trees standing next to it.
The trunk is the reason to come.
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