The Golden Beech of the Zuiderpark Collection

This beech spends its whole year doing what most trees save for October. Fagus sylvatica 'Zlatia' is a golden-leaved cultivar bred to hold colour rather than wait for autumn to produce it: its leaves emerge bright yellow in spring, settle to a softer yellow-green through summer, then brighten to yellow again as the season turns, so the crown never really goes green at all. It stands on a Zuiderpark street corner, planted in the 1950s as part of a rare-tree teaching collection that once surrounded Tilburg's municipal plant nursery, where evening students of horticulture and floristry were quizzed on tree names along a path nicknamed the zweetlaantje, the sweat lane, until the school relocated in 1967. Roughly seventy years old now, its only record is the national tree register, so treat the details as flagged rather than double checked. What a visitor gets regardless is the rarest thing this small collection has to offer: a tree that looks like it is always about to turn, in a residential corner of the city built to teach exactly that kind of looking.