The Caucasian Wingnut of the Zuiderpark Collection

For seventeen years, up to a thousand students a season walked this path and had to name what they saw. Between 1953 and 1967, adult evening students training as horticulturists and florists were examined here, quizzed on the Latin and Dutch names of trees along a route locals nicknamed the zweetlaantje, the sweat lane, for how it felt to be tested on your feet in front of an instructor. This Caucasian wingnut, one of the trees they were made to know, still rings the site of the municipal nursery that trained them. The register misnames it in its own Dutch, calling it a 'Japanese wingnut' though the species it maps is Pterocarya fraxinifolia, the Caucasian kind. That is a small irony for a tree planted to teach people exactly this. Planted in the 1950s, it is young by this project's ordinary standard, in its seventies rather than its centuries, and its case for a page rests on its history rather than its age: a rare-species teaching collection is not something Tilburg has anywhere else. In 1967 the school moved elsewhere and the sweat lane went quiet. The trees it left behind, planted street trees in an ordinary residential corner of Zuiderpark, are free to see any time, no lane, no exam, no waiting for your turn.