Amsterdam's oldest tree is 275 years old, modest against London's millennium-old yews, and that gap says something about the city: built on drained peat and remade repeatedly by fire and war, little here gets left alone for long. What survived did so on purpose, behind a zoo fence, botanical garden glass or a canal-house garden wall. Amsterdam also became one of Europe's great elm cities, and the range runs from the last of thirty elms at Centraal Station to the city's tallest tree, an elm of 35 metres in a university courtyard. Twenty-nine of the thirty-nine are free.
0 of 34 visited in Amsterdam
1
The Heimanseik
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 275 years · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
Amsterdam's oldest tree spent its first ninety years alone. This pedunculate oak took root around 1750, nearly a century before Artis existed at all, in a patch of land that later became a zoo built around it rather than the other way round. It is the one tree in the park older than the institution itself, a genuine relic wearing a visitor wristband it never applied for. Orangutans once used its lower limbs as a climbing frame during outdoor play, before keepers decided a 275-year-old oak deserved a rest from primates swinging off its branches. It is named after Eli Heimans, the schoolteacher-naturalist who wrote about it in 1903 and helped make unglamorous urban nature a subject worth admiring in its own right. His name stuck to the tree the way ivy sticks to a wall. Two fungi now grow in its trunk, common enough in oaks this age, and arborists check it every year to judge how much longer the trunk can be trusted to stand. Summer oaks can live seven centuries, so at 275 this one is, technically, still young. Amsterdam's ground rarely lets anything get that far.
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2
The Leidsebosje Planes
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 165 years · Leidseplein, Amsterdam-Centrum/West
When the city needed to widen a bridge in 1925, Amsterdam moved two fully grown plane trees rather than fell them. Residents near Leidseplein had objected loudly enough that engineers floated the two trunks on rafts and winched them several meters sideways, roots and all, to clear space for a new roundabout. A century later both trees have more than doubled their girth: each now measures over seven meters around, the thickest trunks in the city. A small wooden woodcutter figure, carved by an anonymous sculptor in 1989, sits astride one tree appearing to saw off the very branch supporting it. When that branch actually needed removing around 2020, city gardeners moved the sculpture to the other tree rather than let the joke become true. Amsterdam has since proposed the pair for national monument status, an unusual honor for something that is, after all, still just two street trees that once got in the way of traffic planning. They stand a two minute walk from Leidseplein's trams and taxis, indifferent to both.
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3
The Vondelpark Poplar
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis 'Serotina') · 145 years · Oud-Zuid, Amsterdam-Zuid
One of the tallest trees in Amsterdam stands on the edge of a bicycle path, not in a forest. Sources disagree on exactly when this Canadian poplar went into the ground, sometime between the park's founding around 1870 and a specifically documented 1885, but either way it has reached roughly 38.5 meters, taller than most buildings in the surrounding Oud-Zuid neighborhood. Its trunk measures 617 centimeters around, the third thickest in the city behind only the two plane trees in Leidsebosje. Poplars grow fast and die relatively young for a tree, rarely making it past 150 years, so this one is closer to the end of its run than the beginning, and unlike an oak it will not get centuries more to look forward to. Vondelpark's own written guide to its old trees singles this poplar out specifically, distinguishing it from an ash of similar age elsewhere in the park that never got nearly as large. Whether anything in the city stands taller is an open question: the elm at the Oudemanhuispoort is the usual rival and we have found no measurement of it we trust, so if you know one, tell us. Cyclists and joggers pass beneath this crown on Van Eeghenlaan every day without registering that one of the tallest trees in a city of canals and gabled houses is a poplar nobody planted to be a landmark.
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Photo: Ceescamel (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4
The Wertheimpark Wingnut
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 125 years · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
This tree has outlasted the park's own name twice. Wertheimpark was laid out in 1812 and named for the Jewish philanthropist Abraham Carel Wertheim in 1898, a year after his death. In August 1942 Amsterdam's Nazi-appointed mayor renamed it Parktuin to erase the connection, and the wartime name lasted until liberation restored the original in May 1945. The wingnut, a Caucasian species with broad horizontal branches that thicken into plank-like ribs to support their own weight, was already forty years old by the time any of that happened. It now spreads a canopy 24 meters across in a park barely three-quarters of a hectare in size, one of roughly fifteen trees here over a century old. Since 1993 the park has also held Gebroken Spiegels, Amsterdam's memorial to Dutch victims of the Holocaust, and the annual remembrance ceremony takes place within sight of the tree's crown. The municipality classified the wingnut as a monumental tree in 2002, a smaller but no less deliberate act of naming than the ones the park itself went through.
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Photo: Guilhem Vellut (CC BY 2.0)
5
The Cycad of the Hortus
Eastern Cape Giant Cycad (Encephalartos altensteinii) · 300 years · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
This plant was already growing in South Africa when Amsterdam's Hortus Botanicus bought it in 1850, and the two have been growing together ever since. It is an Eastern Cape giant cycad, estimated today at around 300 years old, kept potted under glass in the garden's Palm House for the 175 years it has lived here. Cycads as a group have barely changed in 300 million years and survived two mass extinctions that wiped out most of the plant kingdom around them, which makes one specimen's three centuries look almost brief by comparison. A younger female cycad, roughly 200 years old, grows opposite it, and Hortus staff hand-pollinate the two every year because the specific wasps and beetles that pollinate cycads in the wild do not live in an Amsterdam greenhouse. A few meters further into the same glasshouse stands a specimen of Encephalartos woodii, a cycad extinct in the wild since the early 1900s; every plant of that species alive anywhere today is a clone of a single specimen found in South Africa in 1895. The Hortus has been growing rare and difficult plants since 1638, and this cycad has now been part of that project for nearly half the garden's history.
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6
The Olifantsiep
Dutch Elm, 'Belgica' cultivar (Ulmus x hollandica 'Belgica') · 115 years · Zeeburg, Amsterdam-Oost
One branch of this elm grows so low and so heavy that the city built it a prop, and that branch is where the tree gets its name: early residents thought it looked like an elephant's trunk reaching for the ground. Amsterdam planted this twin-stemmed elm on Zeeburgerdijk sometime between 1900 and 1915, according to conflicting municipal and conservation records. The city has tens of thousands of elms, more per capita than almost anywhere else in Europe, a legacy of planting elms along canals for their tolerance of the polluted, waterlogged soil common near open sewers a century ago. Dutch elm disease, first identified and named in the Netherlands in the 1920s, wiped out huge numbers of European elms over the following decades, and Amsterdam's collection survived largely because of an aggressive, decades-long eradication and breeding program that continues today. The Olifantsiep, girth pushing five metres, has outlived that epidemic and the severe storm of January 2018, and still leafs out every spring behind a low fence anyone can lean on.
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7
The Lomanstraat Cathedral of Trees
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 110 years · Willemspark, Amsterdam-Zuid
Nobody designed the tunnel of trees on Lomanstraat. When the street was planted in the early 1900s as part of Plan Zuid, architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage's expansion of the city southward, the trees on both sidewalks simply did what trees flanked by tall apartment blocks do: leaned toward the middle of the street, chasing the light above the buildings. A century of that lean has interlocked their crowns into a continuous green tunnel overhead, and the street is now one of the most photographed in Amsterdam-Zuid, nicknamed the cathedral of trees by people who have walked under it. A persistent local story claims the trees survived wartime firewood shortages because a German office once stood on the street, which is the kind of detail that sounds too tidy to verify and probably is. What is verifiable is simpler: given decades and a narrow gap of open sky, ordinary street trees will find a way to close it, and nobody in Amsterdam-Zuid had to plant a cathedral on purpose. It just grew there.
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8
The Amstelkade Olive Willow
Olive Willow, likely Russian Olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia) · 78 years · Rivierenbuurt / Amsterdam-Zuid
Despite the name, this tree is not a willow and has nothing to do with olives. The olijfwilg on Amstelkade is an Elaeagnus, a shrub-turned-tree genus with silvery, willow-shaped leaves and small fragrant flowers that ripen into fruit resembling tiny olives, hence a common name that misleads on both counts. Planted in 1948, three years after the Netherlands emerged from wartime occupation, it has grown along the Amstelkanaal into what the city's own tree inventory calls a specimen unique in the Netherlands for its combination of size and age. Nobody has documented a comparable one anywhere else in the country. At under 80 years old it is the youngest tree on this list by decades, included not for age but because Elaeagnus rarely gets the decades of undisturbed growth it takes to reach tree scale, most specimens staying shrub-sized in gardens rather than lining a public street. Amsterdam's official register of notable trees lists it among the city's most distinctive, a quiet distinction for a tree most passersby would assume was an ordinary willow if they noticed it at all.
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9
The Wingnuts of Amstelveld
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 96 years · Amsterdam-Centrum, Grachtengordel
In 2006 the city government tried to cut down 14 of these trees, and lost. The district council issued a felling permit that summer for over a dozen of the square's 46 Caucasian wingnuts, part of a resurfacing plan under an outdated tree ordinance. Two residents filed objections, then a court challenge, then finally an appeal to the Raad van State, the country's highest administrative court, after a district court sided with the city. No tree was felled while the case ran, and by 2010 the dispute ended with the square fully replanted around the surviving wingnuts rather than in place of them. To protect the three oldest, most valuable specimens from a resurfacing project's foot and cart traffic, engineers installed an underground support system to stop the soil from compacting around their roots, an unusually expensive concession for a handful of street trees. The wingnuts' surface roots still push up paving stones around the square often enough that it is a known feature of walking across Amstelveld, not a defect. The market that runs here on Mondays sets up its stalls under the same canopy the city once planned to remove.
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Photo: Noland Martin, iNaturalist (CC BY)
10
The Rijksmuseum Wingnut
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 119 years · Museumkwartier, Amsterdam-Zuid
The Rijksmuseum's own architect planted this tree in his own garden design, and it outlived every renovation the museum went through afterward. Pierre Cuypers, who designed the Rijksmuseum building itself, laid out its surrounding gardens between 1884 and 1916 in distinct historical styles, neo-Renaissance parterres beside a wild landscape garden, and planted a Caucasian wingnut near the director's villa in the southeast corner around 1907. By a 2014 survey the tree stood over 19 meters tall with a trunk more than four meters around. When the museum closed for a decade-long renovation completed in 2013, the landscape firm Copijn redesigned the gardens from scratch and could have cleared the site for something new. Instead the wingnut was kept and built around, one of the few mature trees preserved through the entire project. Wingnuts are still uncommon as full-grown specimens in the Netherlands, which puts this tree in the same small company as the ones in Wertheimpark and Amstelveld across town, three separate stands of the same species that all happened to reach old age inside Amsterdam's public gardens rather than getting cleared for something newer.
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11
The Turkish Hazel of the Hortus
Turkish Hazel (Corylus colurna) · roughly 230 years · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
Bomenstichting, the Dutch tree foundation, calls this the oldest and thickest Turkish hazel in the Netherlands: planted in 1795, and three metres around today. That makes it two centuries younger than the Hortus itself, which has grown rare and difficult plants since 1638, but older than almost everything else standing in the garden. Turkish hazel is native to Asia Minor and the Balkans, a relative of the small hazel that produces the nuts, built at oak scale instead: pyramidal, broad-crowned, capable of forty metres. This one flowers in January, when its male catkins hang and shed pollen while the rest of the garden sits bare, a small performance almost nobody times a visit around. The 1795 planting date and the 300 centimetre girth both trace back to the tree's own record-keepers rather than an outside survey, so treat the figure as the Hortus's own claim rather than a courtroom fact. It grows a few minutes from the garden's giant cycad, itself pushing three centuries old, so two of Amsterdam's oldest living things now share the same corner of the Plantage. Entry costs a Hortus ticket, same as it always has: rare plants have never been free to see here.
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12
The Turner's Oak of the Hortus
Turner's Oak (Quercus x turneri) · roughly 131 to 161 years (sources disagree on planting year) · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
This oak does not drop its leaves in autumn. It holds them, dark and leathery, through the whole Dutch winter, and only lets go in spring when new growth physically pushes the old leaves off the twig. Turner's oak is a hybrid raised in an English nursery in the late eighteenth century, a cross between the evergreen holm oak of the Mediterranean and the pedunculate oak of northern Europe, and it took half its habit from each parent. It grows slowly and stops at around ten metres, which for an oak is nothing at all. The acorns hang on long stalks. The graft union is still visible about thirty centimetres above the ground, the seam where a nurseryman joined this tree to somebody else's roots. When that happened is contested. Amsterdam's register of protected trees says 1865; the Bomenstichting guide to the city's monumental trees says 1895. Thirty years apart, the same tree, and neither shows its working, so read the age as somewhere between 130 and 160 years. Either way it stood here for a century before the University of Amsterdam let go of the garden in 1987 and a private foundation took it on, which is why the register lists this tree's owner as a private party rather than the city. January is the month to come, when the rest of the garden is bare and this one is not. Entry needs a Hortus ticket.
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13
The Westkant Plane of Wertheimpark
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 125 years · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
Five metres of trunk in a hundred and twenty-five years is quick work. Amsterdam's register of special trees puts this plane's planting at 1900 and its girth at 500 centimetres; the Dutch Tree Foundation, surveying the same park for its own walking guide to the city's monumental trees, describes a plane here with a trunk of almost five metres. Two institutions, one measurement, no argument.
London planes grow fast when young, and this one had good ground for it. Wertheimpark was laid out in 1812 as Amsterdam's first public park, on the edge of the Plantage, a quarter the city had set aside for gardens rather than housing over a century earlier. The park has stayed small, barely three quarters of a hectare, which packs around fifteen trees over a century old into a two minute walk.
This is the west side specimen, on the Plantage Parklaan flank, a short distance from Jan Wolkers' Auschwitz memorial of 1977: broken mirrors set into the ground so the sky comes back cracked. The plane was already forty years old when the deportations that monument answers to began.
The city files it as beschermwaardige houtopstand, its settled protected class rather than the provisional tier. That guarantees nothing about a tree's health, but it does mean somebody with a clipboard comes back.
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14
The Oriental Plane of Wertheimpark
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · roughly 125 years (sources disagree, see notes) · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
In a bad summer this plane stays green while its cousins go brown. Plane anthracnose, the leaf blight that leaves common planes blotchy and half bare by August, troubles the Oriental plane much less, which is one way to pick this tree out of the group standing along Wertheimpark's water.
Its age is a real disagreement rather than a rounding error. Amsterdam's register of special trees gives a planting year of 1900. The Dutch Tree Foundation's guide to the city's monumental trees dates what reads as the same tree to 1880 or 1890. Nobody has reconciled the two, so the honest answer is somewhere between 126 and 146 years old, and this page is not going to pick a winner for the sake of a tidy number.
The trunk measures 4.42 metres around. Platanus orientalis is the older half of the London plane's parentage, a species from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia that European gardens have been planting since the sixteenth century, and its leaves are cut deeper, into narrower fingers, than the hybrid lining most Amsterdam streets. In a park this small you can stand under both within two minutes and see it.
It sits in a tight group of five or six registered trees along the water, including two Caucasian wingnuts of roughly its own age, which makes this corner of the park the densest thing of its kind in central Amsterdam.
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15
The Leopold Maple of Wertheimpark
Norway Maple 'Leopoldii' (Acer platanoides 'Leopoldii') · roughly 106 years · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
The point of this tree happens in April. Acer platanoides 'Leopoldii' opens its new leaves pink and white, streaked and splashed as though someone had flicked paint at them, before they settle into a mottled green for the summer. The cultivar came out of Louis van Houtte's nursery in Ghent in the middle of the nineteenth century, one of a wave of variegated garden forms the Belgian trade sold across Europe, and it is why a fairly ordinary sized maple ended up on Amsterdam's register of special trees.
Ordinary is the right word for the rest of it. The register gives a planting year of 1920 and a girth of 262 centimetres, which for a Norway maple of that age is unremarkable, and the register is also the only document anywhere that names this individual tree. Everything else known about it is known about the cultivar in general.
What it has is position. It stands along the water in Wertheimpark with an Oriental plane eighteen metres away and two Caucasian wingnuts beside them, in a park of three quarters of a hectare holding around fifteen trees over a century old, with Artis on one side and the Hortus a few minutes down the road. Come in late April and it is the one in the group visibly doing something.
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16
The Oudemanhuispoort Elm
Dutch Elm (Ulmus x hollandica) · about 135 years · Amsterdam-Centrum
The tallest tree in Amsterdam stands in a courtyard barely wider than it is tall. The Hollandse iep in the Oudemanhuispoort reaches 35 metres, higher than anything else in the city, and the enclosure is the reason. Brick buildings surround the garden on four sides, so a tree here has exactly one direction available to it, and this one took it. The register puts the planting at 1890.
The Oudemanhuispoort was built in the eighteenth century as an almshouse for the city's elderly poor. It belongs to the University of Amsterdam now, and the vaulted passage along one side has carried a second-hand book market for well over a century. Thousands of students walk past the trunk every day on the way to a lecture, which is a lot of foot traffic for a tree almost nobody has heard of.
The species is the other half of it. Dutch elm disease reached the Netherlands in the 1920s and killed elms here by the hundred thousand, and Amsterdam, an elm city by tradition, lost a great deal of its stock. This one was already about thirty years old when the disease arrived, and it is still going.
Go on a weekday, in from the Kloveniersburgwal end, and look into the southwest corner. It is not a tree that announces itself from the street, because from the street you cannot see it at all.
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17
The Wilhelminalinde
Lime (Tilia sp.) · 128 years · Amsterdam-Centrum
Wilhelmina had been queen for eight years before anyone crowned her. She inherited the throne in 1890 at the age of ten, her mother governed as regent until she came of age, and the inauguration finally happened in September 1898. Amsterdam marked it by planting a lime, and the lime is still standing on the Kalverstraat.
The address is the odd part. The Kalverstraat is the busiest shopping street in the Netherlands, a canyon of chain stores that hundreds of thousands of people walk down in a week, and the coronation tree sits just off it by the Amsterdam Museum, in the complex that was the city's civic orphanage for four centuries.
Commemorative trees are usually the most forgettable objects in a city. They go in at a ceremony, the plaque weathers, and within a generation nobody remembers the occasion. This one outlived its occasion in the most literal way available: Wilhelmina reigned for fifty-eight years, through two world wars and five years of broadcasting to the occupied Netherlands from London, and abdicated in 1948. The tree was fifty. Early in 2025 it was added to Amsterdam's list of two hundred champion trees.
What it is not is old. At around 128 it is younger than half the trees on this page, and limes routinely pass three hundred. We have not established which lime it is; several species and hybrids are planted here under the same name. If you know, tell us.
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18
The Van Loon Copper Beech
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · about 130 years · Grachtengordel, Amsterdam-Centrum
The best evidence for this tree's age is a photograph. In Museum Van Loon's own collection sits a picture from 1923 showing the beech as a young tree, which is what puts its planting in the 1890s and makes it around 130 years old now.
It stands in one of the last intact canal-house gardens in Amsterdam. The house at Keizersgracht 672 went up in 1672, its first resident was Ferdinand Bol, who trained in Rembrandt's workshop, and the Van Loon family bought it in 1884. Behind the formal parterres stands a coach house dressed up with a classical front, and the garden between the two survived the century in which most Amsterdam back gardens were built over, subdivided or paved for cars.
A copper beech is not a wild plant in any meaningful sense. It is a colour mutation of the common beech that appears now and then in European woods and was propagated by nurseries because people liked the look of it, so every purple beech in a nineteenth-century garden is there because somebody chose it and paid for it. This one was a wealthy family's ornamental decision, taken when their house was already two hundred years old, and it is still standing exactly where they put it.
The garden opens with a museum ticket. It is small, walled and quiet, in the middle of a canal ring that is neither.
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19
The Rijksmuseum Poplar
Lombardy Poplar (Populus nigra 'Italica') · about 110 years · Museumkwartier, Amsterdam-Zuid
This poplar was planted as architecture. The Rijksmuseum opened in 1885 and the ground around it was laid out as an outdoor annexe of the collection, filled with fragments rescued from demolished Dutch buildings: gateways, doorframes, a pavilion. Early in the twentieth century a line of Italian poplars went in to frame one of those historic gates, and this is one of them.
The choice makes sense the moment you look at the tree. Populus nigra 'Italica' barely spreads. It grows as a narrow column, which is why it was planted in rows across Europe for two centuries to line roads, mark boundaries and give flat country a vertical. In a garden of salvaged stone doorways it does the work of a pilaster.
The register puts the planting between 1910 and 1920, so it is around 110 years old, and for this cultivar that is a considerable age. Lombardy poplars are fast, soft-wooded and short-lived by the standards of the trees on this page, and most of those planted in the same decade elsewhere in Europe are long gone. This one stood through the wartime evacuation of the museum's collection to shelters outside the city, and through the ten-year rebuild that gutted the building and reopened it in 2013, while the garden around it was redesigned more than once.
Free, with the garden. The Jan Luijkenstraat side is the quiet way in.
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20
The Weteringplantsoen Wych Elm
Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra) · about 120 years · Weteringschans, Amsterdam-Centrum
Nobody knows when this elm was planted and the register says so outright: history unknown, planting somewhere between 1900 and 1910. What is documented is what stands in front of it. The Van Randwijk monument on the Weteringplantsoen carries the best known line in Dutch resistance writing, Henk van Randwijk's warning that a people which yields to tyrants will lose more than life and property, and then the light goes out. Van Randwijk edited the underground paper Vrij Nederland through the occupation.
The tree behind the monument is a wych elm, and that is the interesting part of the label. Ulmus glabra is usually counted as the only elm truly native to the Netherlands, and it is highly susceptible to Dutch elm disease, which arrived in the 1920s and worked through the country for the rest of the century. A mature wych elm standing in a Dutch city centre is not a common thing. This one is around 120 years old, so it was here before either world war and has stood through both.
It sits in a strip of grass and gravel between the Weteringschans and the water, the sort of triangle a city ends up with where two roads fail to meet cleanly. Free, always open, and a few minutes' walk from the Rijksmuseum. Three more trees on this list stand within two minutes of it.
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21
The Weteringplantsoen Ginkgo
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · about 110 years · Weteringschans, Amsterdam-Centrum
There is a ginkgo growing on a traffic island on the Weteringschans, and it is the least likely thing on this list. The species is around 200 million years old, older than the flowering plants, and it survives in the wild in a handful of Chinese valleys. Its Dutch name, tempelboom, records how it got through: monks planted it in temple grounds and kept it going while it disappeared everywhere else. This one lives between lanes of traffic.
Amsterdam put it in somewhere between 1910 and 1920 and the register records no history for it whatsoever, which suits a tree that simply gets on with things. Ginkgo tolerates exactly the conditions that kill other street trees: compacted soil, road salt, exhaust, root space measured in single square metres. Several ginkgos within two kilometres of the Hiroshima hypocentre survived the bomb and are still growing.
Come in November. For eleven months this is a green tree with odd fan-shaped leaves that people walk past without a glance. Then over about a week the whole crown turns a flat saturated gold, and then it drops the lot, often in a day or two, leaving a gold ring on the tarmac around it. Traffic islands rarely get a moment like that.
Free, always visible, and easy to miss for most of the year. The wych elm, the leaning poplar and the plane are all a minute or two away.
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22
The Leaning Poplar of the Weteringschans
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · about 120 years · Weteringschans, Amsterdam-Centrum
Every year Amsterdam inspects this poplar and decides whether it can stay another one. It leans, visibly and considerably, out over the Weteringschans, and a trunk more than five metres round leaning towards a busy road is a question a city has to keep answering. So far the answer has been yes.
The reason it can be is under the pavement. A tree growing off vertical loads one side of its root plate far harder than the other and responds by laying down extra wood exactly where the pull is, thickening those roots into anchors. Leaning is not the same as unstable, and this one has had a century to engineer itself. The city prunes the heavy limbs on the road side to keep the load down, and inspects it annually.
It is a Canadapopulier, a cross between two other poplars that appeared in France around 1750 and was then planted across the continent for its speed. Speed is the point of the species and also the catch: poplars grow fast, get large and are not built for the long term, which makes a specimen of this girth at 116 to 126 years old worth stopping for.
The street it leans over was laid on Amsterdam's city ramparts after they were levelled between 1820 and 1840, and kept the name Schans until 1850. Free, always there, and impossible to confuse with the trees around it.
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23
The Weteringplantsoen Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 140 years · Weteringschans, Amsterdam-Centrum
This is the oldest tree in this group and the register has nothing to say about it. Planting: somewhere between 1880 and 1890. Reason for protection: monumental. History: unknown. That is the entire file on a London plane that has stood on the Eerste Weteringplantsoen for around 140 years.
The date is worth holding on to, because of what the ground nearby had just stopped being. The Weteringschans beside it was laid out over Amsterdam's city ramparts after they were levelled between 1820 and 1840. A plane planted here in the 1880s went in while that change was still recent and this whole edge of town was new.
London plane is the standard European city tree, and the reasons go beyond fashion. It sheds its bark in plates and takes the grime with it, which is how it stayed alive and legible through a century of coal smoke that turned other species black. It puts up with compacted roots, hard pruning and drought, and it is why the same tree lines streets from Barcelona to Berlin. Amsterdam has hundreds of them. This one has been at it longer than nearly all of them.
Free, at the quieter end of the plantsoen. The leaning poplar, the wych elm and the ginkgo are each within two minutes on foot, which makes this corner an unusually dense patch of old trees for the middle of a city.
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24
The Falckplantsoen Pagoda Tree
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · roughly 116 to 136 years (the register gives two different planting bands) · Weteringschans, Amsterdam-Centrum
In August this tree covers itself in white flowers, weeks after every lime and chestnut in the city has finished. The Japanese pagoda tree is a legume from Korea and China, with fine pinnate leaves and a crown that goes wide rather than tall, and late summer flowering is the reason people plant it.
It has the room to spread because a canal was filled in. The Falckstraat was named in 1870 after a prominent Amsterdammer and is unusually broad for the centre, because it was laid over a stretch of the Achtergracht filled in around 1869. A filled canal leaves a generous street, a generous street leaves root space, and root space is how a crown this wide ended up thriving on a corner of the Reguliersgracht.
Its age is genuinely unsettled. The register gives the planting band in two places and gives it differently, once as the 1890s and once as the 1900s, so the honest answer is somewhere between 116 and 136 years. The trunk carries a large wound on its south side, partly grown over, and the city prunes the heavy overhanging limbs on a schedule to keep the crown in balance. A second, smaller pagoda tree stands beside it.
Free, on the street corner, and worth timing. For most of the year it is a good tree with unusual foliage. In August it is the reason to be standing there.
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25
The Wertheimpark Sycamore
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · about 110 years · Plantage, Amsterdam-Centrum
A sycamore is the most ordinary large tree in northern Europe, which makes it worth asking why this one sits on the national register for dendrological reasons rather than for history or memorial value. The register does not say. Under history it writes: unknown. Somebody with a measuring tape decided this specimen was exceptional enough to protect and left it at that.
It stands behind the monument to Abraham Carel Wertheim, the banker and philanthropist the park was named after in 1898, a year after his death. The tree went in between 1910 and 1920, so it is around 110 years old and has spent every year of it a few metres behind that monument.
Acer pseudoplatanus is a maple that acquired the English name sycamore, which it shares with an unrelated American plane, and the confusion has never been cleared up. It seeds itself into every gap in every European city, grows anywhere, and if nothing interferes it can pass four hundred years, which makes 110 barely adulthood. The species is so common that a good specimen tends to be overlooked, which is roughly what happened here until the register caught up with it.
Free, in a park of three quarters of a hectare holding around fifteen trees over a century old. Go and see whether you can work out what the surveyor saw.
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26
The Last Elm of Stationsplein
Dutch Elm (Ulmus x hollandica) · about 120 years · Amsterdam-Centrum
Around thirty elms were planted in front of Amsterdam Centraal after the station opened in 1889. One of them is still standing.
The rest went to Dutch elm disease, which reached the Netherlands in the 1920s and then killed elms across the country by the hundred thousand. The fungus travels in bark beetles and blocks the tree's own water vessels, so a mature elm can go from healthy to dead inside one summer. Amsterdam's elm stock, one of the largest in Europe, was hit hard. This tree stood through all of it, on one of the busiest pieces of ground in the Netherlands, and surveyors still rate its condition as reasonable.
It is not resting on its history either. When it was last measured in 2022 its trunk was over three metres round, and it is recorded as adding a little more than a centimetre of girth every year, which is a tree still doing business rather than hanging on.
By that same 2022 survey the city had planted young elms on the square around it. If those take, the old view in front of the station slowly comes back and this one stops being the last of anything, which is what everybody involved would prefer.
Free, in the open, straight out of the station's main doors. Trams, bikes and the whole flow of the station pass within metres of it, and almost nobody looks up.
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27
The White Poplar of Broersepark
White Poplar (Populus alba) · roughly 160 years, from a registered planting date around 1870 · Amstelveen
The register that protects this poplar says plainly that it is no longer impressive. Its own entry drops the word monumental and then keeps the tree on the list for one reason: with a planting recorded between 1860 and 1870, it is probably the oldest thing growing in the Broersepark.
The park in Amstelveen is much younger than that. It was designed in 1926 and laid out over the following years as a Wandelpark, a place made for walking, and only in 1967 took the name of Chris P. Broerse, the garden man who had worked there since the first season. On the dates in its file the poplar was already sixty years old before anyone drew a line on the plan. Nobody wrote down who put it there.
It wears the years openly. The crown has been knocked about, the trunk leans, and the root plate has lifted enough to raise a hump at the foot. In 1999 honey fungus, a wood-rotting parasite, turned up at the base, and the condition has been rated moderate ever since. What it still does as well as anything younger is the trick white poplars are named for: a gust turns the leaves over and the whole crown flickers silver.
You will find it on the south side of the park, at the edge of the pond. Only the national register describes this tree, so if you know more of its story, tell us.
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28
The Jakoba Mulder Tulip Tree
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · roughly 90 years, from a registered planting date around 1940 · Amstelveen
Jakoba Mulder helped design the Amsterdamse Bos, and then somebody planted a tree inside it in her honour. She lived another fifty years to watch it grow.
Mulder was born in Breda in 1900 and worked as an architect and town planner. The forest, originally called the Boschplan, was laid out slowly between 1934 and 1970 on polder ground southwest of the city, and the stretch this tree stands in lies in Amstelveen. The national register puts the planting at around 1938 and records that the tulip tree was reportedly her favourite of the lot. She died in Amsterdam in 1988, by which time the forest was nearly finished and the tree was half a century old.
It has grown into the specimen you would want as a memorial: whole, evenly proportioned, no lost limbs, nothing much wrong with it. Tulip trees come from the eastern American forests, and the leaf gives them away, shaped as though somebody snipped the tip off square. The flowers open high in the crown in June, greenish-orange and genuinely tulip-shaped, and most people pass underneath without once looking up. By late October the whole crown goes clear butter-yellow.
You can see it from the cycle path, south of the Bosbaanweg at the edge of the playing field. Only the register describes it in any detail, so if you know more, tell us.
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29
The Old Lady of the Forest
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 130 years, from a registered planting date around 1900 · Amstelveen
The trunk you are looking at carries on about two metres below your feet. When the Amsterdamse Bos was built the ground level here was raised, and the soil around this chestnut was banked up carefully, with rubble, rather than replaced.
She is called De Oude Dame van het Bos, the old lady of the forest, and she has the better claim to the ground than the forest does. The register records her planting in 1895; work on the Bos only began in 1928. In her first decades she stood in the Rietwijkeroordpolder, beside a farmhouse, in a landscape that no longer exists in any form. The polder went under the trees, the farm was pulled down, and the horse chestnut was left standing where it was, with its feet buried.
The years show on her. The register notes a possible bleeding canker on the heavy northwest limb and at the trunk itself, and a large torsion crack running through a damaged branch on the north side. It also notes that she comes into full leaf and is otherwise in good heart. In May the candles go up, white with a red fleck at the throat, and by October there are conkers in the grass.
Find her at the western edge of the Grote Speelweide in Amstelveen, at the treeline near the canoe hire. Only the national register describes this one, so if you know more, tell us.
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30
The Poplar of the Eleanor Rooseveltlaan
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · roughly 120 years, from a registered planting date around 1910 · Amstelveen
Hardly anyone lets a Canadian poplar reach this age. The register puts this one's planting between 1900 and 1910, which makes it about 120, and the species is normally out of the ground long before that.
Populus x canadensis is a hybrid of an American poplar and a European one, bred for speed, and it went into the Dutch landscape in enormous numbers along roads, dykes and field edges. It makes height in a decade and shelter in two. What it does not make is old bones: the wood is soft, heavy limbs come out in a gale, and most street poplars are taken down at fifty or sixty on exactly that reasoning. This one is still standing in a strip of municipal garden on the Eleanor Rooseveltlaan in Amstelveen. Roosevelt herself was a young woman in New York when it was planted.
The register knows nothing else about it. Under the tree's own history it records a single word: unknown. Nobody wrote down who put it there, or why a fast nursery hybrid on a suburban corner was left alone long enough to end up on a national list of monumental trees. If you know that story, tell us.
Come on a windy day. Poplar leaves hang on flattened stalks that let them twist edge-on to a gust, so a crown this size does not rustle so much as pour.
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31
The Elm of Elsenhoeve
Dutch Elm (Ulmus x hollandica) · roughly 100 years, from a registered planting date around 1930 · Amstelveen
This elm is alive because somebody injects it, every year. The register's entire note on the tree is one line of Dutch saying exactly that: treated annually against elm disease.
Dutch elm disease emptied European streets of a tree that used to define them. The fungus travels from tree to tree in bark beetles and can wilt a mature elm within a season. It is named after the Netherlands not because it began here but because Dutch scientists were the ones who identified the fungus, in the 1920s, which is roughly when this tree went into the ground: the register puts its planting between 1920 and 1930. It has lived its whole life alongside the thing that kills its kind, through a century in which most of Europe's elms disappeared.
Ulmus x hollandica is a natural hybrid, wych elm crossed with field elm, and the Amsterdam region is one of the few places in Europe where elms are still an ordinary street tree rather than a rescued specimen. That took decades of felling infected wood, watching for beetles, and precisely the treatment this one gets.
It stands in front of Speelboerderij Elsenhoeve, a children's farm on the Bankrasweg in Amstelveen, so most of the people underneath it are five years old and looking at goats. The pin marks the garden rather than the trunk, and only the national register describes this tree, so if you know more of it, tell us.
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32
The Red Horse Chestnut of Wilhelminaplein
Red Horse Chestnut (Aesculus x carnea) · roughly 100 years, from a registered planting date around 1930 · Amstelveen
Half of this tree is American. The red horse chestnut is a cross between the white-flowered chestnut of every Dutch avenue and Aesculus pavia, a red-flowered species from the American southeast, and it turns up in the record in Germany around 1820 with nobody quite able to say who made it.
The result is the best-behaved chestnut on any street. In May it holds up candles of deep rose-pink rather than white, a little later than its white parent, so a street planted with both appears to flower twice. It sets very few conkers, and the husks it does set have almost no spines, which makes it a disappointing tree for anyone under twelve. In exchange it largely escapes the leaf miner moth that has been browning out Dutch horse chestnuts by August for twenty years now; the caterpillars strongly prefer the white parent, and this hybrid stays green into autumn while its neighbours look scorched.
This one stands in public planting on the Wilhelminaplein in Amstelveen, with a registered planting somewhere between 1920 and 1930, which puts it at roughly a century old. That is all anybody has written down. The national register's history field for this tree is blank, and no second source describes it at all. If you know who planted it, or what for, tell us and we will add it.
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33
The Beatrix Lime
Lime (Tilia sp.) · roughly 90 years, from a registered planting date around 1940 · Amstelveen
This lime went into the ground on 31 January 1938, the day Princess Beatrix was born. The register still lists it as De Beatrix linde.
Dutch towns marked royal births with trees as a matter of course, and this was a birth worth marking: Beatrix was the first child of Juliana, who was herself the only child of Queen Wilhelmina, and the line had been running on a single life for two generations. The baby the tree was planted for became queen in 1980 and stayed on the throne until 2013. The tree has stood on this corner the whole time, including the German occupation that sent the family into exile in London barely two years after the planting.
It has not aged as easily as she has. The register's inspectors record dead wood in the top and along the main limbs, and a flush of young shoots breaking out inside the crown, which is what a stressed lime does when it starts rebuilding itself lower down. They want the ground around the roots examined to turn things around. A street tree in trouble is almost always suffering from what is under it rather than what is above.
You will find it where two through-roads meet at the Veenendaalplein in Amstelveen, in full view, which the register notes with some approval. Nobody has recorded which lime species it is.
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34
The Catalpa of the Cleopatralaan
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · roughly 70 years, from a registered planting date around 1960 · Amstelveen
Every spring this tree gives its street a fright. The southern catalpa is one of the last trees in Europe to come into leaf, often not until the end of May, by which point everything around it has been green for six weeks and it is still a bare grey skeleton hung with last year's beans.
Those beans are the other thing. The flowers open in July, white and orchid-shaped, freckled with purple and striped yellow down the throat, in upright clusters that a grown tree carries by the hundred. What follows is a crop of thin brown pods up to forty centimetres long that hang on through the winter and give the species its other name, the Indian bean tree. Nothing else on a Dutch street looks remotely like it.
Catalpa bignonioides is a narrow native, from a corner of the American southeast around Georgia and Florida, and it took to European cities largely because it puts up with being boxed in by pavement.
This one grows opposite the houses on the Cleopatralaan in Amstelveen. Nobody wrote down when it was planted. The register reasons that the neighbourhood went up in the 1960s and the tree probably dates from the same work, which places it somewhere in the 1950s or 1960s, and that reasoning is the whole of the evidence. If you know better, tell us.
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