The Cantonspark Giant Sequoia

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.