What is the oldest tree in Antwerp?

Two possible birthdates bracket this tree, and heritage assessors who protected it as a monument in 1949 never picked between them: 1789, the year the short lived Brabant Revolution threw off Austrian rule, or 1830, the year Belgium became a country in its own right. Both were the kind of moment 18th and 19th century Europeans marked by planting a tree rather than raising a monument, a vrijheidsboom, and this copper beech's size, a trunk just under five metres around and a canopy 32 metres wide, fits either timeline. It most likely spent its early decades inside the walled garden of the neighbouring rectory before that wall came down and left it standing in the open square people see today. Compared with cities that can point to a planting record or a girth-based estimate accurate to a few decades, Antwerp's oldest tree carries a two century wide margin of error and no way to close it further without written evidence that has never surfaced. The nearest rival for oldest, the protected summer linden at Rivierenhof, has a documented park history stretching back further but no individual dating of its own. The beech stands in a public square in Berchem, free to see, no ticket required.