What is the oldest tree in Baarn?

The best-documented is the American oak of the Pekingtuin, planted around 1850, with a 5.52 metre trunk. The copper beech at Kasteel Groeneveld may be older, estimated at 150 to 200 years, but that figure is inferred from girth rather than recorded.

Why does a village like Baarn have a sequoia and a dawn redwood?

Because the Cantonspark was Utrecht University's botanical garden from 1920 to 1987. When the university withdrew, the collection's trees stayed behind in what is now a free public park, open daily.

Are Baarn's remarkable trees free to visit?

Seven of the eight are free. The Pekingtuin, the Cantonspark and the lawn in front of the town hall are public ground in the village itself, and Kasteel Groeneveld is a Staatsbosbeheer estate with open grounds. The one exception is the fallen catalpa in the grounds of Paleis Soestdijk, where the palace garden charges a small entry fee and opens Friday to Sunday.

What happened to the Kronkelbeuk in the Pekingtuin?

The famous twisted beech that generations of Baarn children climbed no longer appears to be standing; it is recorded in our research as gone rather than listed as a tree to visit. If you know more about when and why it disappeared, the suggestion form on every page reaches us.

Netherlands

Ancient Trees in Baarn

Baarn is a villa village that royalty, bankers and a university all planted for their own reasons, and the trees outlasted every one of those reasons. The Cantonspark spent seven decades as a university botanical garden, so a dawn redwood, a giant sequoia and a tulip tree share a free village park. The Pekingtuin holds a red oak the village ringed in honour, Paleis Soestdijk a catalpa a 1973 storm knocked flat and a queen left lying, and the town hall lawn a plane older than the building. Seven of the eight are free.

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Highlights

The Town Hall Plane

London Plane · 130 years

The Cantonspark Giant Sequoia

Giant Sequoia · 100-120 years

Autumn colour

The Cantonspark Dawn Redwood

Dawn Redwood · 78 years

Autumn colour

The American Oak of the Pekingtuin

Northern Red Oak · 175 years

Autumn colour

The Tulip Tree Grove at Kasteel Groeneveld

Tulip Tree · 110-115 years

Photo: Atsje (CC BY-SA 4.0)

All 8 trees

Autumn colour

The Cantonspark Dawn Redwood

Dawn Redwood · 78 years

Until 1941 this species existed only as a fossil. Botanists had described Metasequoia from imprints in stone and assumed it had been gone for millions of years, and then a stand of them turned up alive in central China. Seed went out to the world's botanical gardens within a few years, and Baarn got some of it. This tree germinated around 1948, which makes it one of the first generation of dawn redwoods to grow in Europe since the species disappeared from the record entirely. It has grown fast. It measured 4.22 metres around in 2008 and 5.10 metres by 2021, and over roughly the same decade its height went from 25.4 metres to 28.2. By the standards of its own kind it is still a child. The park explains the company it keeps. Cantonspark was laid out in 1902 as the private garden of the industrialist August Janssen, taken over by Utrecht University in 1918 as its botanical garden, and handed to the municipality as a free public park in 1987. Seven decades as a teaching collection is why a Dutch village park holds a living fossil, a giant sequoia and a pinetum. One honest note. The girth and height above were measured in October 2021, so a tree growing this fast is a little bigger by now.

The Cantonspark Giant Sequoia

Giant Sequoia · 100-120 years

The tallest thing in this village park is a Californian. A giant sequoia, 5.20 metres around and roughly 34 metres tall when it was last measured in 2014, standing a fifteen minute walk from Baarn station and a long way from the Sierra Nevada, where the species survives in a scatter of groves and nowhere else in the wild. Nobody wrote down when it was planted, so the age here is an estimate rather than a record. The park was laid out from 1902 for the industrialist August Janssen, passed to Utrecht University in 1918, and the university added a pinetum, a teaching collection of conifers, for its botany students. A girth of 5.20 metres fits a tree put in the ground somewhere in that window. The park's own description calls it one of the tallest and most monumental trees it has and leaves the date alone as well. What it has stood through is a university career and the end of one. Utrecht ran the garden until 1987, then let it go, and the municipality took it over and opened it free to anyone. The collection stayed exactly where it was and simply became a park, which is why a sequoia and a dawn redwood now share a lawn with dog walkers. One honest note. The Netherlands' own tree register lists this specimen too, still thickening toward six metres of girth, so the 5.20 metre figure above is ageing rather than current.

Autumn colour

The Tulip Tree Grove at Kasteel Groeneveld

Tulip Tree · 110-115 years

Crowd trees together and they race each other. The tulip trees planted at Groeneveld between 1912 and 1915 went in as a grove rather than as specimens, around sixty of them standing close, and the competition for light drove them to 33 and 34 metres, among the tallest of their species recorded in the Netherlands. Their trunks are modest by comparison, between 2.7 and 3.1 metres around. They spent everything on going up. The place to stand is the ice cellar. The estate's ijskelder, a brick chamber dug to hold winter ice through the summer, sits at the foot of the three tallest, and it now serves as a hibernation roost for bats. Above it the grove closes over your head. There is a catch to a tulip tree this tall, and the local nature society states it plainly. The flowers, green and orange and genuinely tulip-shaped, open so high in the crown that most visitors only ever see them after they have fallen. In June, look down. This entry is a grove, not a single stem, so come for one destination rather than one trunk. The original planting is around 113 years old; smaller trees mixed in among them are later infill, and the pin marks the ice cellar rather than any individual tree.

Photo: Atsje (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Copper Beech by the South Pond, Groeneveld

Copper Beech · 150-200 years

At 5.28 metres around, this is the thickest beech on the Groeneveld estate, and the number comes with an asterisk. It was measured a metre off the ground rather than at the standard 1.3 metres, almost certainly because something at chest height, a low limb or a spreading buttress, made the usual spot unmeasurable. So it is not directly comparable to the estate's other big beeches, which run from 4.00 to 5.05 metres taken properly. It is still the largest of them by a wide margin. Nobody recorded when it went in, so the age above is inferred from its girth and from what was happening around it. Groeneveld's grounds were first laid out in Dutch Baroque geometry and then loosened into English landscape style through the nineteenth century, particularly after 1830, and a solitary copper beech placed for effect beside water is exactly that fashion. An open-grown beech this thick is usually put somewhere between 150 and 200 years old, which is a range and not a date. Most of the estate's beeches stand together in a copse west of the castle, competing and drawn up thin. This one has stood alone by the southernmost pond, which is why it carries the low, wide frame it does, roughly 27 metres tall and spreading. With the leaves down, that frame is the reason to walk out here in January.

Autumn colour

The American Oak of the Pekingtuin

Northern Red Oak · 175 years

Planted around 1850 and now 5.52 metres around, the American oak of the Pekingtuin is the heaviest trunk in Baarn's village centre, and it stands five minutes from the railway station in a park that costs nothing to enter. Quercus rubra comes from the eastern United States, and the Dutch call it the Amerikaanse eik. This one went into the ground as an exotic in the private grounds of Villa Peking, decades before the railway and the villa quarter around it took their present shape. What is left of that garden is the park, a wide lawn carrying very large trees, most of them oaks, with a bandstand from 1948 at one end. The Torenlaan that ends at the villa was laid out in the 18th century as a sight line to the tower of the Pauluskerk, so the ground this tree stands on was already being composed as a view a century before anybody planted it. The park's best known feature belongs to a different tree. About sixty metres west, a smaller one stands inside a corten steel ring carrying a line by the poet Ewoud M. Rosenthal, set into the grass in 2021 to keep feet off the roots. The oak has no ring around it. It is simply the biggest thing on the lawn.

Juliana's Trumpet Tree

Southern Catalpa · 150-160 years

In April 1973 a storm knocked this catalpa flat in the grounds of Paleis Soestdijk, and Queen Juliana told her gardener to leave it exactly where it fell. The roots held. Rather than dying, the tree kept growing sideways, and new vertical trunks rose up along its horizontal length, the way a fallen willow sometimes resprouts. Guides at the palace gardens still point visitors to what they simply call the fallen trumpet tree, a catalpa planted around 1870 that turned storm damage into its main attraction. Trumpet trees rarely age gracefully in the Dutch climate. Their root systems tend to stay shallow, and mature specimens often topple in exactly this way. Most get cleared afterwards. This one got a royal reprieve instead, and half a century on it still flowers white in July from a trunk that runs along the ground rather than up from it. The palace garden charges a small entry fee and opens Friday to Sunday. Past the flower garden Juliana kept for herself is this: a tree that fell over and simply refused to stop growing.

Autumn colour

The Tulip Tree of Cantonspark

Tulip Tree · 110 years

Baarn already has a grove of tulip trees at Kasteel Groeneveld, sixty of them racing each other skyward. This one stands alone, by Cantonspark's main entrance on Abel Tasmanlaan, a few paces from the park's giant sequoia, and it has had the easier life of the two: the Netherlands' own monumental tree register describes its crown as well kept and its trunk as sound, marked only by a few old insect exit holes in the bark and a small, healed wound at ground level. It went in the same decade as its sequoia neighbour, somewhere between 1910 and 1920, when Cantonspark was still the private garden the industrialist August Janssen laid out behind his house Schoonoord. Liriodendron tulipifera is an American import and a relative of magnolia, named for the orange and green, tulip-shaped flowers a mature specimen produces, usually so high in the canopy that most visitors only ever find the fallen ones. This tree has had over a century to reach flowering size. Cantonspark itself passed from Janssen's estate to Utrecht University's botanical garden, then to Baarn's municipality in 1987 for one guilder, on condition its planting survive the handover intact. It has been free and open ever since, and every part of the park now carries Rijksmonument protection. The register flags this tree specifically for how visible it is to the public and how rare its species still is in the region, tucked right where most visitors first walk in.

The Town Hall Plane

London Plane · 130 years

Over four and a half metres round and roughly 130 years old, the plane on the lawn at Stationsweg 18 is a century older than the town hall it stands in front of. That building went up in 1993, on the footprint of a villa from 1897, and the national tree register suggests the plane may have been planted while the villa was being built. The same register records its condition as good despite that building history, which is worth something for a tree that has had construction work inside its root plate. It belongs to the municipality and stands in full view of the through road, which is why the register calls the position a fine one. In September 2026 the municipality picked it to launch the European TreeTag campaign in the Netherlands, and had it measured first. It stands 26 metres and carries 412 square metres of leaf, which hold back some 64,000 litres of rainwater a year; the carbon stored over its life is reckoned to match the exhaust of a car driven more than 92,000 kilometres. Those figures go onto a wooden tag at its foot, which is the whole idea of the campaign: what a tree is worth, written down where people walk past it. It is five minutes from Baarn station, and nothing stops you standing under it at any hour.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Baarn?: The best-documented is the American oak of the Pekingtuin, planted around 1850, with a 5.52 metre trunk. The copper beech at Kasteel Groeneveld may be older, estimated at 150 to 200 years, but that figure is inferred from girth rather than recorded.
Why does a village like Baarn have a sequoia and a dawn redwood?: Because the Cantonspark was Utrecht University's botanical garden from 1920 to 1987. When the university withdrew, the collection's trees stayed behind in what is now a free public park, open daily.
Are Baarn's remarkable trees free to visit?: Seven of the eight are free. The Pekingtuin, the Cantonspark and the lawn in front of the town hall are public ground in the village itself, and Kasteel Groeneveld is a Staatsbosbeheer estate with open grounds. The one exception is the fallen catalpa in the grounds of Paleis Soestdijk, where the palace garden charges a small entry fee and opens Friday to Sunday.
What happened to the Kronkelbeuk in the Pekingtuin?: The famous twisted beech that generations of Baarn children climbed no longer appears to be standing; it is recorded in our research as gone rather than listed as a tree to visit. If you know more about when and why it disappeared, the suggestion form on every page reaches us.
More like this: 4 of these trees also appear in Autumn Worth the Trip.
Ancient trees in nearby cities: Hilversum · Amersfoort · Stoutenburg · Utrecht · Breukelen · Amerongen · Harderwijk · Amsterdam · Every city on the map

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