What is the oldest tree in Alkmaar?
The oldest tree recorded in Alkmaar is a white willow standing in the Veenbos in an old polder at Grootschermer, which the national register places in a wide planting band of 1800 to 1850, so somewhere between about 175 and 225 years old. Within the city itself the oldest is a plane in the Alkmaarderhout, banded 1850 to 1860. There used to be a better answer than either: a beech in the Alkmaarderhout that had grown to almost seven metres round, originally three shoots planted together and possibly dating from the first half of the nineteenth century, when a tree nursery stood on that spot. It came down in the Poly storm in the summer of 2023 and about four metres of trunk is still standing.
Ages here come from the Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen, which records a planting decade rather than a year, and two of the bands on this page are fifty years wide rather than ten. The register is the 2024 edition and is the single source throughout, so everything here is flagged. It is also a register that goes out of date: the Alkmaarderhout beech described in the answer above is still listed in it and has been gone since 2023, and we found that out one sentence before publishing it as this city's oldest tree. Treat every age here as a claim from a good official source rather than as a measurement, and tell us if a tree is not where this page says it is. The willow at Grootschermer is the one to read carefully: its band is fifty years wide, and a pollarded willow's age is really a record of how often somebody came back to cut it rather than of a planting. Where a pin is marked approximate we know the bastion, the wood or the polder and not the exact trunk, which matters most out at the Veenbos, where there is no landmark to steer by.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.