Ancient Trees in Zuiderpark

Between 1953 and 1967, evening students training as horticulturists and florists were examined here, on their feet, on the Latin and Dutch names of the trees around them, along a route locals nicknamed the zweetlaantje, the sweat lane, for how it felt to be quizzed in front of an instructor. The trees they were tested on still ring the site of the municipal nursery that trained them. A Caucasian wingnut misnamed 'Japanese' in its own register entry. An American yellowwood whose cut wood runs bright yellow. A pecan, a species that belongs to the warm river valleys of the American south, growing in Brabant since the 1950s. A Transcaucasian birch kept in its rare single-trunked tree form rather than the shrub shape the species usually takes. A golden beech that never really turns green at all. None of them are old by this project's usual standard, all roughly seventy years, and each one's only record is a single national register entry with no independent account. Their case for a page rests on what they were planted to do: give a generation of students something unfamiliar to learn. The school moved on in 1967. The trees, and the lesson, are still free to walk past.