The Catalpa of Wilhelminapark

Wilhelminapark's own walking guide to its oldest trees calls this one Trompetboom, trumpet tree, the Dutch common name for catalpa, and once it flowers in July the name explains itself: white, orchid-shaped blooms crowd the canopy in dense clusters, followed by seed pods that hang on through winter looking like a stand of thin green beans left out to dry. Catalpa bignonioides grows broad and low rather than tall, its heart-shaped leaves among the largest of any tree commonly planted in Dutch parks. The Dutch national monumental tree register dates this specimen to the 1890s, on the west edge of the park's play meadow, one of the original plantings from Wilhelminapark's founding as an English-style landscape park in 1898. No girth is recorded for it in any source found, and the planting decade rests on the register's own dating rather than a documented record, so treat the age, roughly a hundred and thirty years, as an estimate. It is stop seventeen on the park's own Rondje Oude Reuzen trail past its oldest and most impressive trees, a route that also passes the wingnut and the Cappadocian maple mapped separately on this site. Free, in a public park a short walk from the centre.