The Caucasian Wingnut of Wilhelminapark

Wilhelminapark opened in 1898, laid out in the informal English landscape style fashionable across the Netherlands at the time, and this wingnut is one of roughly twenty-four trees in it now protected as monumental. Pterocarya fraxinifolia is native to river valleys in the Caucasus and northern Iran, a relative of walnut and hickory rather than anything European, grown here for a wide, low, spreading crown and for the strange fruit it hangs each summer: strings of winged seeds up to half a metre long, dangling like decorations nobody put up on purpose. The Dutch national register of monumental trees dates the planting to the 1890s, putting the wingnut among the park's first generation, planted while the layout itself was still new rather than added later. No source gives its girth, and the register carries no basis for the decade beyond its own record, so treat the age as an informed estimate rather than a measurement. The park itself keeps an informal walking route past its own oldest trees, called Rondje Oude Reuzen, Round of Old Giants, and this wingnut is stop ten on it, on the western edge of the park's sunbathing lawn. A twenty minute walk from Utrecht Centraal, free, open through the same hours as the rest of the park.