An ice storm in March 1987 damaged this wingnut badly enough that the scar is still visible behind an old branch, and decades on it is one of two enormous trees flanking the path where Vosseparkje...
Ancient Trees in Vosseparkje
Leeuwarden, Netherlands
Vosseparkje, officially Westerpark, exists because Leeuwarden needed a reservoir more than it needed a park.
Garden architect Gerrit Vlaskamp landscaped the grounds around the city's drinking-water works in 1872, and the park he drew was redesigned once more in 1926, by which point most of its oldest trees were already decades in the ground. Five of them sit on the Dutch national monument register today, all inside a few minutes' walk of each other. A Caucasian wingnut from the Caspian forests carries a trunk over a metre round and a scar from a 1987 ice storm. A black locust planted in 1924 has spent a century leaning and is now held up by a prop. Two feather elms of the same narrow cultivar stand at opposite ends of the park, told apart by which one is nearer the pond, and a grey poplar planted in 1909 completes the five. Free, open, no ticket.
The park this elm stands in was laid out around the city's drinking water.
The national register says nothing about how big this elm is and rather a lot about where it stands: it has a fine spot by the pond.
A Historisch Centrum Leeuwarden walking brochure and the national tree register agree down to the year: this grey poplar on the east side of Vosseparkje's pond went into the ground in 1909, one of...
Leeuwarden's own walking brochure does not lead on this tree's species.
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