Weeping Willow

It is fast-growing and soft-wooded, the sort of tree that usually falls to storm or age long before it earns a place beside the oaks and yews this site otherwise maps. That makes its exceptions worth naming. In Hiroshima, one stood 370 metres from the point the atomic bomb detonated in 1945 and is still alive today, the closest registered survivor the city has. In Leiden, one has wept over the statue of Pieter van der Werf for more than a century, its own history otherwise unrecorded by any source found so far. In Alkmaar, a third bends over an 1876 victory monument in a park laid out by the Zocher family, who also reshaped the city's old bastions. None of these three are ancient by this site's usual standards. They earn their place by surviving what a short-lived species rarely manages.