Turn one of this lime's leaves over and the underside is a soft, felted silver, which is where the species gets its name and why the whole crown seems to flicker when wind moves through it.
Ancient Trees in Wilhelminapark
Leonard Springer laid out the Wilhelminapark in 1894, and its oldest tree already stood on that ground for thirty years before he arrived: a silver lime from the 1860s, its leaves felted silver underneath, planted near what is now a stone bench positioned to sit beneath it.
Springer's own park brought the rest, all dated by the Dutch national monument register to the 1890s: a weeping beech at the pond's western edge whose lowest branches root back into the soil, a Caucasian wingnut on the Vijverstraat corner that strings its seeds in half-metre chains, and a plain green beech along Paul Withausenweg standing quietly among its more colourful, copper and weeping cousins. The fifth tree breaks from the register's dating entirely: a catalpa leaning so far out over the pond that the municipality now props its lowest limbs on columns, its age inferred from the park's own founding rather than any planting record. All five stand within a few minutes' walk of each other, free and open daily.
All 5 stand in Breda, which maps 10 remarkable trees in total.
The lowest branches of this beech touch the ground and can root back into it, so what looks like one tree is quietly capable of becoming a ring of them.
This wingnut carries its seeds in chains that can run half a metre long, dozens of winged nuts strung like beads down a single stalk.
This is the plain, green-leaved beech among a park that otherwise favours its copper and weeping cousins, which makes it the least conspicuous registered tree in Wilhelminapark and one of the largest.
This catalpa grew sideways instead of up, and Breda decided to help it keep doing so.
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