The Oak of Valkenstijn

This oak's girth runs past four metres, and it is in better shape than most trees this old get to be: a sound trunk, a clear run for its crown, and a growing spot nobody has ever crowded. It stands in Valkenstijn, nearly ten hectares of park in what is now Assen-Oost, and the park is the shrunken core of something larger. The ground was once called Vredeveld, after a manor house founded around 1650 that stood, by the end derelict, until it was pulled down in 1966. The oak is registered to the 1870s, two centuries after that house first went up, which makes it a comparative latecomer to land that had already been landscaped for generations. What Vredeveld's grounds became is now open to anyone: old trees, avenues, hedgerows and wide meadows, with Valkenstijn as public parkland at the centre of the district that grew up around it. The register calls the oak's planting only likely rather than certain. What it does not have to guess about is the tree itself, sound, spacious and doing well.