The Broken Cypress of Overcingel

This one is included for what it might become rather than what it is. The register's own notes call it barely monumental any more, because at some point the main trunk broke off, and what stands today is largely regrowth. It shares Overcingel's grounds with the estate's oak and horse chestnut, on land landscaped in 1824 by Lucas Pieter Roodbaard, and the register guesses all three went in around that redesign, though nothing dates the cypress itself more precisely than the 1880s. Bald cypress is an unusual choice for a Drenthe estate garden, a wetland conifer from the American South, deciduous unlike most conifers, its needles turning rust orange and dropping every autumn. What the register is watching, and what a visitor can watch too, is whether the tree manages to rebuild a real crown from where it broke. That is an open question rather than a finished story, and it is the honest reason to include a damaged tree on this list: it is alive, it is trying, and nobody yet knows how it ends. It stands on the same private grounds as its two Overcingel neighbours, reachable with a walking card from Het Drentse Landschap's Assen office, or without one during the February and March crocus season.