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
1
The Oak by the Statue of Frederick Henry
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 340 years, if the register is right that it went in with the palace avenues between 1685 and 1690 · 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.
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2
The Pollarded Lime of Ugchelen
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 225 to 275 years, from the register's planting band of 1750 to 1800 · 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.
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3
The Copper Beech of the Upper Garden
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 205 to 215 years, from the register's planting band of 1810 to 1820 · Het Loo
Copper beeches were a fashion, and this one arrived at the height of it.
The purple-leaved form of the common beech is a natural mutation. It turns up on its own now and then in European woods, and from the eighteenth century onward nurseries learned to graft it and sold it hard to anyone laying out a landscape garden. Between 1810 and 1820, when this one went into the back of the upper garden at Het Loo, having one was a statement about being current.
Two centuries later the fashion has aged into something better. A copper beech at this size is a dark solid mass of a tree, and in a formal garden built on symmetry and pale gravel it does the useful job of being the one heavy dark thing in the composition.
Stand under it rather than in front of it. Beech leaves are thin enough that a mature purple canopy lit from above turns the light underneath a deep red, which is the reason people planted them and the reason the photographs never work.
It is at the far end of the Boventuin, behind the formal planting.
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4
The Tulip Tree of the Palace Garden
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · roughly 205 to 215 years, from the register's planting band of 1810 to 1820 · 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 same stretch as the copper beech beside it, 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.
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5
The Copper Beech by the Pond
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 175 to 185 years, from the register's planting band of 1840 to 1850 · Het Loo
A generation younger than the beech at the back of the upper garden, and planted where it would be reflected.
This is the second copper beech in these gardens and the placing is the point of it. It stands on the west side of the pond, which means the water sits between you and the tree for most of the approach, and a dark purple canopy over still water is a trick that landscape gardeners had worked out long before anyone here was planting.
The register puts it between 1840 and 1850. By then the copper beech was no longer a novelty and had settled into being a standard part of the vocabulary, the heavy dark accent you put where a composition needs weight.
What two centuries add is bulk that no design anticipated. These trees keep thickening long after they stop rising, so a mature one ends up out of scale with everything planted alongside it, and the garden quietly rearranges itself around the biggest thing in it.
Go on a still morning and look at the water rather than the tree.
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6
The Red Oak of the Wilhelminapark
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · 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.
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7
The Lime of Het Woldhuis
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 325 to 425 years, from the register's planting band of 1600 to 1700 · 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.
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8
The Pin Oak of the Oranjepark
Pin Oak (Quercus palustris) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · 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.
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