The Peace Tree of the Grote MarktYoungest tree

The youngest tree on this list stands in the middle of the oldest square. On 3 September 1994, the city planted a small linden on the Grote Markt, ringed by the Renaissance guildhalls and the Gothic town hall that make this square one of the most photographed in Belgium, to mark exactly fifty years since Antwerp's liberation from German occupation in 1944. A bronze plaque set into four chained posts around its base spells out the anniversary in plain terms: Vrijheidsboom, 50th anniversary of the liberation of Antwerp. Unlike everything else on this list, there is nothing uncertain about this tree's age or its meaning, no disputed circumference, no folklore standing in for a missing record. It is barely three decades old, a sapling by the standard of a churchyard beech or a castle park oak, and it will not be the oldest or the largest tree in Antwerp for a very long time yet. What it offers instead is the opposite of ambiguity: a single, dated, deliberately public act of remembrance, growing in the one square in the city that every visitor already walks through.