William III built a hunting palace here in 1685 and planted avenues of oak in front of it. One of those oaks is still standing, by the statue of Frederick Henry, and the national register dates it to that planting. Four more grew up in the palace gardens over the following two centuries. The best tree in Apeldoorn is nowhere near any of them: a pollarded lime six metres round, tucked behind a fire station in Ugchelen, with a bench the council put there so people would sit and look at it.
0 of 8 visited in Apeldoorn
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 340 years · Het Loo
William III wanted somewhere to hunt, and in 1685 he built a palace on the sand north of a village nobody had heard of. In front of it he had oaks planted in avenues, the Koningslaan, because that is what you did with an approach.
The national register believes this is one of them. It gives the tree a planting band of 1600 to 1700 and then says why it leans late: probably planted at the same time as the Koningslaan oaks, which means between 1685 and 1690. That reasoning is the register's own and it is worth repeating rather than hiding, because it is the whole basis for calling this tree roughly 340 years old. Nobody has taken a core.
What is certain is that it was standing when William became King of England in 1689 and left for London, when the French occupied the palace in 1795, and when the last royal resident died in 1962.
It stands beside the statue of Frederick Henry, which is the easiest landmark on the estate. The oak is the heavy one behind it, with the low branching of a tree that grew up in the open rather than in a wood.
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · 225-275 years · Ugchelen
Over six metres round, measured at chest height, and it stands behind a fire station.
That is the whole appeal. Apeldoorn has a royal palace full of documented trees and its thickest and one of its oldest is a lime hidden at an angle behind a municipal building in a village on the southern edge, where you would walk past it for years without knowing.
It is a leilinde, a lime that was pollarded and trained flat, which is what people did to a tree standing against a house front: you kept it low, you cut it back hard every few years, and it gave shade in summer without taking the light in winter. The register reads it the same way and supposes there was once a cottage or a small farm here, with the lime trained across its facade, planted somewhere between 1750 and 1800.
The village council thought this was worth doing something about. They put up a sign on the road pointing to it, and the town had already put a bench there years earlier, so you can sit down and look at it properly.
That is the correct response to a tree like this, and it is rarer than the tree.
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · 205-215 years · Het Loo
It flowers in June and almost nobody notices, because the flowers are green and orange and they sit upright at the ends of branches twenty metres up.
That is the thing worth knowing about a tulip tree. It is not named for its shape. It is named for the flower, which is a real tulip-shaped bloom about six centimetres across, pale green with an orange band at the base, and on a tree this size they are held so high that most people who walk past in flowering season see nothing at all. Bring something to look through, or wait until they drop.
The leaf is the other giveaway and it works all summer: squared off at the tip, as though somebody cut the point off with scissors. There is no other tree in a Dutch garden with that leaf.
It is an eastern North American species, in European gardens since the seventeenth century, and it was planted here in the upper garden between 1810 and 1820.
In October it turns clear yellow, which on a tree this tall is the version of it most people actually see.
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · 155-165 years · Wilhelminapark
This park exists to sell building plots.
The ground was the De Vlijt estate, mostly heath. In 1825 its owner Ameshof built the villa Marialust and dug the large pond that still lies in front of it. Sixty years later the company that had the land wanted to sell it off for villas, and worked out that people pay more for a plot beside a park than a plot beside a field. So in 1885 they laid out the road pattern, and made a walking park around the pond that was already there.
It worked well enough that in 1889 they offered the roads and the park to the town, which took them. In August 1890 the council asked the king for permission to name it after Princess Wilhelmina on her tenth birthday. He said yes, and from 17 August 1890 it has been the Wilhelminapark.
The register puts this red oak between 1860 and 1870, which places it before the park and inside the estate that preceded it. Red oak is an American species, planted here for its autumn colour, and in a good year it is the reddest thing in Apeldoorn.
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · 325-425 years · Woudhuis
The register gives this lime the same planting band as the oak at the palace, 1600 to 1700, and unlike the oak it offers no reasoning at all. That is a century of uncertainty stated plainly, and it is the honest position: somebody surveyed a very old lime on an estate east of the town and could not date it more closely than that.
So it is either the oldest tree in Apeldoorn or roughly the same age as the palace oak, and there is no way to settle it without a core.
What a band that wide does tell you is what the tree looks like. Limes of this age are rarely single clean trunks. They tend to have been cut, layered, split by their own weight and regrown, sometimes hollow, often with the ground around the base thrown up by roots that have had three or four hundred years to spread. A lime is also one of the few trees that can produce a new trunk from a fallen limb that touches soil, which is part of why they last.
If you go and can take a girth measurement at 1.30 metres, send it to us. That is the number that would settle this.
Pin Oak (Quercus palustris) · 155-165 years · Oranjepark
A pin oak of this age is unusual in the Netherlands, because the species did not become a standard street and park tree here until well into the twentieth century. One planted between 1860 and 1870 was somebody's deliberate choice rather than a default.
It is easy to identify and hard to confuse with the pedunculate oaks around it. The leaves are cut into narrow, sharply bristled lobes with deep rounded bays between them, nothing like the soft rounded lobes of a native oak. The lower branches sweep downward toward the ground while the upper ones point up, which gives an old one a distinctive drooping-skirted outline you can read from across a lawn.
Its other habit is holding its dead leaves. Pin oaks often keep a rustling brown canopy through most of the winter and only drop it when the new buds push in spring, so this is a tree that looks occupied in January when everything around it is bare.
It stands on the west side of the Oranjepark, opposite the P. Krugerstraat. In late October it turns a deep scarlet that lasts a fortnight.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 93 years · Parkenbuurt
An oak the size and thickness of trees three times its age stands in the enriched soil of what used to be a rose garden. Ninety-three years is a modest span for a tree on this list, yet this oak has reportedly grown thicker than veterans of 300 years at nearby Paleis Het Loo.
It went into the ground on 24 April 1933, when Lily Roosmale Nepveu, the mayor's daughter, planted a young oak on Prins Hendrikplein to mark 400 years since the birth of William of Orange. The square's wrought-iron fence, designed by Pieter Puype, weaves the Nassau lion and the Orange hunting horn into a repeating figure-eight, and two of its stone posts are carved with the years 1533 and 1933.
The sapling came from the nursery at Berg en Bos and travelled to the square by horse-drawn cart, decked out in orange for the occasion. Nobody has taped its girth, but whatever gave it such an unusually fast start (the old rose garden's soil is the leading theory) it now stands as a small, deliberate monument on an ordinary square: a tree planted for a royal birthday, thriving on ground somebody once tended for flowers.
Black Alder (Alnus glutinosa) · 100 years · Paleispark Het Loo
Old alders are rare in the Netherlands for a mundane reason: they usually grow beside a ditch or a pond, and a farmer or a water board cuts them back every few years to keep the bank clear. This one escaped that fate because it grew inside a royal garden instead of next to a drainage canal.
It stands on the bank of the pond in the Beeldentuin, the sculpture garden tucked into the grounds of Paleis Het Loo, several stems leaning low over the water near the old tea pavilion. Cut into alder wood and it turns from pale cream to a deep orange within minutes, which is why the timber was once prized for clogs and for piles driven into permanently wet ground, since it barely rots underwater. This tree has never been cut for either.
Bomenbieb, the Dutch tree-recording site, dates its planting to around 1920, making it roughly a century old, a comparative youngster on this page next to oaks planted with the palace avenues. Its age is not really the point. What it shows is what an alder becomes left alone: not the stubby, repeatedly pollarded shape of a working streamside tree, but a full, spreading, multi-stemmed specimen, which is what the species can do and rarely gets the chance to.