Around 1388 Amersfoort built a second city wall, heaviest on the northeast side because that was the direction Gelre would come from. The wall is mostly gone and what is left of it is a park with old trees growing out of the rampart, including a catalpa that flowers hard enough to stop people. The oldest tree in the city is nowhere near it: an oak at a crossroads called the Hertekop, where a hunting lodge hung with antlers became a pub, then a meeting point, and then a motorway junction. The oak is what is left.
0 of 7 visited in Amersfoort
1
The Catalpa on the City Wall
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · roughly 125 to 135 years, from the register's planting band of 1890 to 1900 · Binnen de Veste
It is growing on a defensive earthwork built to keep the duke of Gelre out.
Around 1388 Amersfoort put up a second city wall, and put most of the effort into the northeast, because that was the side the trouble was expected from. The wall is largely gone. The bank it stood on is not, and the Plantsoen Oost is what the city made of the remains: a narrow park along the old rampart, planted with big trees whose roots are in six centuries of packed defensive earth.
The catalpa is behind Binnen de Veste 41 and the register singles it out for its flowering, which is fair. Catalpa flowers in late June and early July, weeks after everything else has finished, in upright panicles of white bells with yellow and purple markings inside the throat, and on a mature tree there are hundreds of them at once.
Then it produces the beans. Slender pods up to forty centimetres long hang all winter on the bare tree, which is where the name Indian bean tree comes from, and why this is worth a look in January as well.
Huge heart-shaped leaves, and it comes into leaf later than anything else in the park.
Read more and get directions →
2
The Oak at the Hertekop
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 225 to 275 years, from the register's planting band of 1750 to 1800 · Hertekop
Everything at this crossroads has been replaced except the tree.
It was called the Hertekop after a hunting chalet built here with deer antlers fixed to it. The chalet became an inn. The inn became one of those places everyone in a town knows, where people arranged to meet and where walks and outings started from. Then a southern ring road was laid around Amersfoort, and later joined to a new trunk road running in from Utrecht, and the place changed out of all recognition. The chalet went.
What is here now is a slip road off the A28 and a junction of the Arnhemseweg and the Dodeweg. What is also here is an oak the register bands 1750 to 1800, which was already a substantial tree when the chalet was a going concern, and which is the oldest living thing in Amersfoort.
It is not a beautiful setting and that is exactly the reason to go. Two and a half centuries of a place reorganising itself around a fixed point, and the fixed point is a tree that nobody decided to keep so much as never quite got round to removing.
Park on the Dodeweg rather than trying to stop on the Arnhemseweg.
Read more and get directions →
3
The Copper Beech of the Xaverius Church
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 185 to 195 years, from the register's planting band of 1830 to 1840 · 't Zand
The church went up between 1881 and 1883. The beech was already about fifty years old when the first stone was laid.
That is worth pausing on, because the natural assumption at any church with a big tree beside it is that somebody planted the tree to go with the building. Here the register is explicit that the order runs the other way: banded 1830 to 1840, the beech predates the church by half a century, and whoever chose this plot chose a plot with a mature beech on it.
The register also gives it a health note, which is the sort of thing worth passing on. It calls the tree reasonably good for its age and for its position in an urban area, which is faint praise and honest. City copper beeches have a hard time of it: shallow feeding roots under paving, salt, and no leaf litter left to rot back into the soil.
Copper beech is not a species. It is a purple-leaved mutation of the common beech that turns up occasionally in the wild and is then propagated by grafting, so almost every one you meet was chosen by somebody.
In October the purple burns through to copper, and it is the best week to come.
Read more and get directions →
4
The Plane of the Snouckaertlaan
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 185 to 195 years, from the register's planting band of 1830 to 1840 · Bergkwartier
A plane of this age on a Dutch street corner is a tree that has survived every plan anyone has had for the ground.
The register bands it 1830 to 1840, which puts it here before the villa quarter around it, before the Utrechtseweg was the road it is now, and before almost any of the buildings it stands among. It has spent nearly two centuries on the corner of the Snouckaertlaan while the city rearranged itself.
Planes get this job because they take punishment better than anything else their size. Compacted soil, roots cut for cables, salt, exhaust, and hard pruning: a plane shrugs at all of it and regrows. The species is a hybrid, probably of the oriental plane and the American sycamore, and it first appeared in European gardens in the seventeenth century as an accident of two exotic trees being planted near each other.
The bark is the giveaway and the reason it works in a city. It sheds in irregular plates, taking whatever has settled on it with it, so the trunk is a camouflage of cream, olive and grey that never blackens.
The seed balls hang on all winter, on stalks, like small hard fruit.
Read more and get directions →
5
The Weeping Silver Lime of Park Schothorst
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · roughly 185 to 195 years, from the register's planting band of 1830 to 1840 · Schothorst
This tree carries two different kinds of leaf and you can find both from where you stand.
It is a grafted weeping lime. The weeping form, 'Petiolaris', cannot be grown from seed and is joined onto an ordinary lime rootstock, which means the tree is really two plants sharing a trunk. Above the graft the branches arch out and hang down, carrying leaves on unusually long stalks that let each one swing and show its white felted underside. Below the graft the rootstock keeps sending up its own shoots, and those carry plain lime leaves on short stalks. Look low on the trunk for ordinary foliage and up into the hanging branches for the long-stalked kind.
The register also notes the root flare, which is unusually pronounced and which people walk over constantly, and adds that the tree seems to be standing up to it. That is an honest way of saying it is being slowly damaged and is winning anyway.
It is at the back of Park Schothorst on the edge of the wood, banded 1830 to 1840.
Come in July. Silver limes flower late, and the scent of one this size carries a long way through a wood.
Read more and get directions →
6
The Copper Beech behind the Amershof
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 135 to 145 years, from the register's planting band of 1880 to 1890 · Centrum
It is at the back entrance of a function venue, which is a demotion, and it is the reason to look.
A copper beech planted between 1880 and 1890 was put in by somebody laying out a garden. Nobody plants a purple beech at a service door. So this tree has been through the usual sequence for a city centre: a private garden, a change of ownership, a building extended over most of the ground, and the tree left standing in the leftover space that the extension did not need, which happened to be by the back door.
It is a common story and it accounts for a striking share of the big old trees in any Dutch city centre. The ones that survive are rarely the ones that were treasured. They are the ones that were standing somewhere nobody wanted to build.
What you get is a full grown copper beech in a small hard space on the Burgemeester De Widtstraat, dark and dense and considerably too large for its surroundings, which is a good look at what the species does when nothing restrains it but paving.
Best in October and, for a different reason, in April, when the new leaves come out a translucent red before they darken.
Read more and get directions →
7
The Copper Beech at the Zonnehof
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 135 to 145 years, from the register's planting band of 1880 to 1890 · Zonnehof
The Zonnehof is a piece of open ground on the edge of the old centre that the twentieth century got hold of, and this beech was standing before any of it.
Banded 1880 to 1890, it belongs to the villa gardens that lined the Utrechtseweg when this was the smart approach to the city rather than a through road. Those gardens have gone. The beech is on the northeast side of Zonnehof 2, behind the building that fronts the Utrechtseweg, which is to say in the gap between two eras of construction.
Standing under a copper beech in a city is a specific experience worth going out of your way for. The leaves are thin and the purple pigment is a filter rather than a coating, so strong light coming through a mature canopy arrives underneath as a deep wine red. Photographs never get it because a camera corrects it away. You have to be under it, and it wants a bright day.
This one is a short walk from the plane on the Snouckaertlaan and from the beech behind the Amershof, so all three fit into twenty minutes.
The fourth week of October, if you want it at full colour.
Read more and get directions →