The Pagoda Tree of Lepelenburg

In 1644 the last Ming emperor hanged himself from a pagoda tree on a hill above Beijing, and the species has carried a faintly funereal reputation in China ever since. In Utrecht it has a cheerier job. It is one of very few trees here that flowers in August, hanging loose sprays of cream pea flowers weeks after the limes and the chestnuts have finished, then shedding them until the path underneath goes pale. This is a young tree by the standards of this walk, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The register dates its planting to between 1950 and 1960, roughly 66 to 76 years, which makes it a child beside the 1880s plantings a few hundred metres up the canal. Pagoda trees are slow starters, often twenty or thirty years old before they flower at all, so it has spent about half its life doing the thing people come to see. It stands in Lepelenburg, a bastion of the medieval city wall that became park ground around 1860, opposite Swanenberg. The register files it as a Tempelboom and stops there. Older catalogues call the species Sophora japonica and current botany calls it Styphnolobium japonicum, and neither name is much use: the tree is Chinese, not Japanese. Whether this one is the plain species or a cultivar, nobody has written down.