De Poortwachters

Locals call them Hans, Gretel and the Witch, and Arnhem's storytellers like to credit Karel van Egmond, the last independent Duke of Guelders, with planting these three sweet chestnuts by hand. The dates do not support it: van Egmond died in 1538, and these trees, girths of 750, 718 and 472 centimetres, are closer to 370 years old, planted around 1650 to 1700 at the gateway to Huis Zypendaal. The name that stuck anyway is De Poortwachters, the Gatekeepers, because for the better part of four centuries every visitor to the castle has had to walk between them first. The Hansel and Gretel nicknames follow the same logic. The two thickest, standing side by side, are the well fed pair, and the leaner third is the witch left behind. They survived a fire in 1945, the year Allied troops finally liberated Arnhem after the previous autumn's battle for the city, and outlast everything else the same way they always have, rooted exactly where the path forces you past them. In 2024, for Sonsbeek park's 125th anniversary, artists wired sensors into six of the park's trees for a temporary route called Arnhemse Bomen Vertellen, Arnhem's Trees Tell, translating each tree's sap flow and trunk movement into sound; the Poortwachters were its first stop.