The Agnietenstraat Turkey Oak

This oak was planted in a cemetery and outlasted it. When it went into the ground in 1910, the green strip on the Agnietenstraat was still part of Onder de Linden, a burial ground used between 1852 and 1876 and not cleared away until 1959. The graves went. The tree stayed, and it now looks out at a primary school. Its Dutch name is Moseik, mossy oak, and the reason is in the acorns. Quercus cerris, the Turkey oak, is a southern European species, and its acorn cups are wrapped in long whiskery scales that genuinely look like a growth of moss on the fruit. Nothing native to the Netherlands does that, which makes it the one reliable way to name the tree from the ground. Do not mix the Dutch name up with Moeraseik, which sounds almost the same and means the pin oak, a different tree entirely. In 2017 a residential block went up along the eastern edge of the plantsoen, and construction is the usual way a street tree of this age dies. The register reports that this one came through it in good order, with a sound trunk and a fine broad crown, at roughly 115 years old. Only the register has written the tree itself down, although local historians confirm independently what the ground used to be. Free, public, about fifteen minutes on foot from the station.