The Yew of Brantsenpark

This yew was one of the first trees written into the Dutch register of monumental trees when it opened in 1983. It is widely called the oldest yew in the Netherlands. Nobody has settled that, and the register itself does not make the claim. What the register does say is that the tree went in somewhere between 1600 and 1700, which puts it at three to four centuries. Yew grows so slowly that girth tells you very little about a trunk this size, and it lives so long that a Dutch specimen of this age is unusual rather than remarkable in its own species. It grew up inside the grounds of landgoed Rhederoord, the country estate whose park became the Brantsenpark, so the houses arrived at the tree rather than the other way round. A storm took the original top out decades ago. A resident writing to the register in 2018 remembered photographs of the tree from 1960 and 1961 and described the damage. Somebody once cut a flame shape out of the trunk, which showed that the wood inside is partly hollow. In an old yew that is ordinary rather than a warning. It stands in the front garden of a private house on the Brantsenpark, with an information post in front of it.