The American Yellowwood of the Zuiderpark Collection

Its Dutch name gives away the trick before you have seen it: geelhout, yellow wood, because the wood beneath the bark of a cut branch runs bright yellow. This American yellowwood is another of the specimens planted around Tilburg's old municipal nursery in the 1950s, where evening students of horticulture and floristry were drilled on tree names along what they called the zweetlaantje, the sweat lane. Cladrastis kentukea is native to the American south and rare in Dutch planting, which is presumably the whole reason the nursery grew it: something a florist would otherwise never meet. Multi-stemmed and now in its seventies, it flowers in May and June with hanging white clusters, then turns gold in autumn, living up to the name a second time. Like the rest of the Zuiderpark collection, its record is thin: a single register entry with no independent account of the tree itself, only of the school that once stood around it. The teaching moved elsewhere in 1967 and the students stopped coming, but a scatter of trees they were quizzed on is still rooted in this ordinary residential corner, free to walk past on an afternoon nobody has to pass an exam for.