The Weeping Pear of Trompenburg

Of the trees the national register dates inside Arboretum Trompenburg, the oldest is not an oak or a cedar but an ornamental pear. It puts the planting between 1870 and 1880, which makes it roughly 150 years old, half a century older than the arboretum that grew up around it. Pyrus salicifolia, the willow-leaved pear, is grown for its narrow silver-grey leaves, usually as a small decorative tree rather than a monument. The register calls it a treurpeer, a weeping pear, but names no cultivar, so the familiar drooping 'Pendula' form is likely rather than recorded. When it went in, Trompenburg was still a private estate on the Honingerdijk: James Smith had laid it out from 1820 and combined it with the neighbouring land in 1859, and the landscape architects Jan David and Louis Paul Zocher reworked the western section around 1870. No source ties this pear to their redesign, so treat that as the setting rather than its origin. It then saw roughly 400 elms felled to Dutch elm disease in 1928, James van Hoey Smith turn the grounds into an arboretum, and the public let in for the first time in 1958. The register dates it and the garden's history covers the estate, but no second source names this individual tree. If you know its story, tell us. It is a separate stop from Rotterdam's other trees, with its own entry fee.