The Weeping Silver Lime of the Wilhelminapark

Most old park trees are dated by guesswork. This one has a date. The Dutch national monument register says it was planted in 1898 by Leonard Springer during his original layout of the Wilhelminapark, and the register's note names this tree rather than the scheme around it. The park opened to the public that same May. Springer was designing the whole park from scratch, and a weeping silver lime is a deliberate choice rather than a tree you put in to fill a gap. Tilia tomentosa 'Petiolaris' lets its branches hang, and every leaf carries a coat of white felt on the underside, so a breeze turns the whole crown from green to silver and back in a second. The register records the form as kandelaber, candelabra: the crown was trained up on a frame of raised limbs rather than left to run. Roughly 128 years on, that decision is still the shape of the tree. What nobody has written down is how big it has become. No girth or height figure exists for it in the register or in any other source we could find, which for a lime of this age is a gap a tape measure would close in a minute. If you take one, tell us. It stands in the northwest corner. The elm in the south corner and the Canadian poplar in the northeast make the rest of a short loop, and the park holds twenty-two monumental trees in all.