The American Oak of the Pekingtuin

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.