The Transcaucasian Birch of the Zuiderpark Collection

Most Transcaucasian birches grown in cultivation are shrubs, wide and many-stemmed rather than trees with a single climbing trunk. This one, planted in the 1950s on an ordinary Zuiderpark street corner, is recorded by the national tree register in its natural form, which if the record is accurate makes it a rarity twice over: an uncommon species grown in an uncommon shape. Betula medwediewii comes from the mountain forests of the Caucasus, and like its neighbours on this street it was planted to be studied rather than admired: part of a rare-species collection that once ringed Tilburg's municipal plant nursery, where evening students training as horticulturists and florists were examined on tree names along a route they called the zweetlaantje, the sweat lane, between 1953 and 1967. The register is this tree's only source, so its shape and exact age carry the honest caveat of a single account. What is certain is that it is roughly seventy years old, standing where a school once trained hundreds of students a year in exactly the skill of telling one tree from another, a skill now free for anyone to skip: just walk past and look.