The Watermill Oak

The park's own forest ranger stops at this tree. When Natuurcentrum Arnhem walks its monumental tree route through Park Sonsbeek on Open Monument Day, the old oak by the Witte Watermolen is one of the headline stops, which is a lot of attention for a park-interior tree with no name and no plaque. It is a pedunculate oak, planted somewhere between 1810 and 1820 according to the national register of monumental trees, so roughly 210 years old, put in the ground during the decade that took the Netherlands out of Napoleon's empire and into a kingdom of its own. The register records nothing else at all about its life. Under history it says, simply, unknown. The setting does the rest of the work. The Witte Watermolen, the White Watermill, is Sonsbeek's own historic mill, standing on the Sint Jansbeek, the stream that runs down through the park in a chain of pools and falls that most visitors follow without wondering where the water is going. The oak stands at that stop, free to walk up to, no gate, about fifteen minutes uphill on foot from Arnhem Centraal. Neither source gives a girth, and on a trunk this age that is the one number worth having. If you tape it, send us the figure.