The Himalayan Cedar of Trompenburg

You cannot see this cedar from the street. The national register says so outright: it stands inside Arboretum Trompenburg where no passer-by can see it, so the only way to meet it is to buy a ticket and walk in. The register puts its planting between 1920 and 1930, which makes it roughly a century old. That decade was the garden's turning point. In 1928 roughly 400 elms here were felled to Dutch elm disease, and James van Hoey Smith began turning the estate into a true arboretum. Whether this cedar was part of that first replanting, nothing we found says. A deodar is a tree of the western Himalaya, with soft blue-green needles and branch tips that droop as if tired. Here it grew up alongside a collection that Dick van Hoey Smith later built into one of international standing. The garden opened to the public in 1958 and received the International Dendrology Society's Conservation Plaquette in 1983. The register dates it, but no second source names this particular cedar, and we found no published girth or height. If you have measured it, tell us. It is a separate stop from Rotterdam's other old trees, about three kilometres away, with its own entry fee.