The Relocated Yew of the Geestersingel

A 450-tonne crane picked this yew up and lifted it over the rooftops of Alkmaar. Until 2018 it had spent something over a century out of sight. The city's 2017 list of monumental trees records it at Langestraat 115-117 with the note staat in de winkel, standing in the shop: a yew in a courtyard behind a shopfront, walled in on all sides, known to the people whose windows looked onto it and to very few others. That same list marks it rare and worth keeping. Then the building was to be renovated and the tree was in the way. The usual outcome of that sentence is a chainsaw. Instead the municipality spent four years preparing to move it, and in the spring of 2018, with the work logged as starting on 18 March, the yew came out of its courtyard vertically, over the roofs, onto a lorry and across the city to a roundabout on the Geestersingel, where the register says it has room to grow for another hundred years. Its age depends on who you ask. The 2017 list says 150 years, the register's planting band works out nearer 130, and both are estimates rather than counted rings. One honest gap: beyond the register, that municipal list and the tree firm's own record of the job, we found no press account of the move. If you watched it, tell us.