The Zijpendaal Oak

This oak grows on the line where a country estate stops and a street begins, at the corner of the wood on Landgoed Zijpendaal with Daam Fockemalaan on one side and De Vilderskamp on the other. That position is written into its shape. An oak on a woodland edge grows two ways at once: drawn up and narrow where the other trees crowd it for light, and spreading heavy low limbs out across the open side where nothing competes. Walk around it and you are effectively looking at two trees stuck together. The national register dates the planting to between 1850 and 1860, which makes it roughly 175 years old, and if that band holds it was already standing when Eduard Petzold redrew the estate's gardens in 1864. Under history the register has written nothing whatsoever, which is the ordinary fate of a tree that never belonged to anybody famous and never fell on anything. It sits at the northern end of the Zijpendaal walk, a kilometre or so beyond the watermill oak and the Lorentz monument oak, on ground the IVN publishes as a marked public route, so reaching it costs nothing but the walking. Nobody outside the register has recorded this tree, so treat the 1850s dating as one authority's estimate. If there is an old photograph of this corner in a family album, we would like to see it.