384-Year-Old Tree Is ‘Old Lady’ of Dutch Garden

The yellow flowers cascading from the laburnum tree in Leiden University’s Botanical Garden would have amazed Carolus Clusius. He planted it here 384 years ago.

The tree has blossomed without fail every spring since 1601, when Clusius, the garden’s first director, planted the young laburnum along one of the garden’s outer walls.

The tree is now about 33 feet high and is healthier than ever, Clusius’ present-day successor, Gerrit van Vliet, said.

“It’s amazing how the old lady survived such a long time without major problems,” he said of the tree, which the Dutch call “golden rain.” The scientific name is Laburnum anagyroides Mediterraneum.

Its long life is meticulously chronicled in the garden’s yearly records, begun by Clusius. In 1594, he supervised the botanical garden’s first plantings in a 102-by-132-foot plot, and wrote about his flowers until his death in 1609.

The widely traveled Clusius is credited with compiling the first floral guides to Spain and Austria in the 16th Century. His other claim to fame was introducing a Turkish flower here that was to become a Dutch national symbol: the tulip.

Although air pollution, the bane of botanical gardens, is relatively light in this medieval Dutch city near the North Sea, Van Vliet said that over the 391 years of the tree’s existence, a large number of the garden’s other trees and flowers have fallen victim to natural catastrophes such as whitefly and windstorms.