The Memorial Yew of Eendrachtsplein

Rotterdam spent its first postwar years rebuilding rather than remembering, and it took one person to insist on a place to do both: Willem Ganter, first violinist of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, who raised money for a memorial tree at the garden of the police station on Eendrachtsplein, a spot the city had trusted people to gather at even during the occupation. A 20-year-old European yew was ordered from England and planted in 1947, already a substantial tree rather than a sapling, because a memorial planted small would have taken decades to look like one. The yew has had a harder life since than the plan intended. A new tram line cut through the area, then a metro line in 1983, and the police eventually moved out of the building entirely, which is now a cafe. The tree itself once grew on two trunks and now stands on one, having lost the other somewhere along the way, and simply outlasted every change around it regardless. Had Ganter chosen a less tenacious species, none of this would have survived to be told. It stands free, in the open, beside the entrance of the building it has outlived every use of.