Ancient Trees in Villapark

It is a garden suburb, laid out from 1907 to house Philips executives, and its oldest trees stand on ordinary street verges rather than behind a gate. Whoever planted them reached past the default lime and plane for a small, deliberate collection: this is where you find a Caucasian wingnut on a residential street, its winged seed pods hanging in strings up to half a metre long by late summer, a species most visitors will never have seen anywhere else. A pin oak on Prinsenhof carries the tightest date of the group, the national monumental tree register and the city's own separate street-tree survey landing within four metres and ten years of each other on 1890 to 1900, a rare case of two independent records agreeing this closely. Its neighbour a few doors down is a double-flowered horse chestnut, named specifically as a chosen cultivar in the municipality's own survey rather than whatever the nursery had spare that year. A second horse chestnut, the ordinary kind, stands 250 metres away on Palingstraat, easy to mistake for the first if you do not know there are two. A southern catalpa on Julianastraat, the cigar tree with its heart-shaped leaves and orchid-like summer flowers, sits on one source rather than two: the register names it, the city's own inventory does not. It stands anyway, flagged honestly rather than left out. All five grow on public verges and street corners, free to walk past any day, a five-minute loop through a district still recognisable as the plan that built it.