The Pecan of the Zuiderpark Collection

A pecan tree in Tilburg is already the story. Carya illinoinensis belongs to the warm river valleys of the American south and Mexico, and one has been growing on this ordinary Zuiderpark street corner since the 1950s, part of the same rare-tree collection planted around the city's old municipal nursery to give trainee horticulturists something unfamiliar to learn. Whether it has ever produced a usable nut this far from home is not recorded, and the register that is the only source for this tree says nothing about it beyond species, age band and location. What the register does confirm is that the nursery deliberately sought out trees like this: species nobody training as a Dutch florist or gardener would otherwise encounter, planted along a path its evening students nicknamed the zweetlaantje, the sweat lane, for the oral exams held on it between 1953 and 1967. The teaching stopped when the school moved to a different site in 1967, and the trees it left scattered through this corner of the neighbourhood are the only evidence it ever existed. This one shares its street corner with a Caucasian wingnut a few paces away, part of the same quiet collection, free to see, no ticket, no exam.