The American Oak of the Pekingtuin

In October 2021 the municipality of Baarn asked its residents what to write on a ring around a tree. Around twenty people sent something in. The line that won came from the poet Ewoud M. Rosenthal, submitted by his daughter, and it now runs around a steel band six metres across and twenty centimetres high, set into the grass of the Pekingtuin. The ring is not decoration. It marks off the root plate of a northern red oak planted around 1850, now 5.52 metres around, and it is there to keep feet off the soil above the roots and to hold the fallen leaves in place so they rot down where they landed. Compacted ground is one of the quietest ways to kill an old tree, and the town decided this one was worth a fence you can read. The species is the other half of the story. Quercus rubra comes from the eastern United States, and the Dutch call it the Amerikaanse eik. It was planted here as an exotic in a private pleasure garden decades before the villa quarter and the railway around it took their present shape, and it outlasted the garden: the Pekingtuin is now a free municipal park, five minutes on foot from Baarn station. The pin marks the Javalaan side of the park rather than the exact stem.