The Tulip Tree of Sittard's Stadspark

This tulip tree grows in Sittard's Stadspark, a short walk from the pin oak the register also lists nearby, banded to a planting around 1920, roughly 110 years old. Liriodendron tulipifera comes from the eastern United States, where it grows as one of the tallest broadleaf trees in North America, and the name undersells what it actually produces: cup-shaped flowers, greenish yellow with an orange band inside, closer to a magnolia in shape than a tulip, opening from late spring high in the crown where they are easy to miss from directly underneath. The leaves are the more reliable identifying feature, four-lobed with a flat or slightly notched tip as if squared off with scissors, unlike any native European tree, and in autumn they turn a clean, even butter yellow across the whole crown rather than the patchy colour many species manage. A municipal park stocked with North American specimens like this one and the pin oak nearby reflects an early twentieth century fashion for filling Dutch parks with trees that had no local precedent, chosen for how unlike anything native they looked. The register records only species and decade for this one. If you know more, tell us.