The Flowering Ash of the Wilhelminapark

The national register lists this tree and then admits you probably cannot see it. Its visibility field reads nee, no, which is an odd thing for a monument list to concede about a monument. The tree is there, in the northwest corner of the Wilhelminapark, planted with the rest of the park when Leonard Springer laid it out in the 1890s. Which trunk it is, among several similar trees standing close together in that corner, the register does not settle and neither can we. The pin here is honest about that: it puts you in the right corner and leaves you to look. There is one stretch of the year when looking gets easy. Fraxinus ornus is not the common ash of Dutch roadsides. It is a smaller southern European relative that flowers, properly flowers, in May and June, throwing dense upright plumes of creamy white over the whole crown at once. The Dutch call it pluimes, plume ash; in English it also goes by manna ash. Nothing else in that corner of the park does anything close to it. Its age comes from the register's planting band of 1890 to 1900, which puts it near 130 years, the same generation as the park itself. Nobody has recorded its girth. If you find it, either a tape measure or a plain note saying which trunk it was would close a gap we cannot close from here.