What is the oldest tree in Baarn?
The best-documented old tree in Baarn is the American oak of the Pekingtuin, planted around 1850, with a trunk of 5.52 metres around. The copper beech by the south pond at Kasteel Groeneveld may be older still, at an estimated 150 to 200 years, but its age is inferred from girth rather than recorded.
Baarn's trees are the residue of three different ambitions. The Pekingtuin was the garden of a vanished villa named Peking, and its red oak predates the park that formed around it; in October 2021 the municipality placed a protective ring around the trunk and invited villagers to submit inscriptions for it, which is the kind of honour most towns reserve for statues. The Cantonspark explains itself differently: from 1920 to 1987 it was Utrecht University's botanical garden, and when the university left, the exotics stayed, so a village of thirty thousand keeps a dawn redwood and a giant sequoia the way other towns keep a war memorial. Kasteel Groeneveld's tulip tree grove and copper beech belong to the estate-building era, when a good lane of trees was how you showed the neighbours you intended to stay. The ages here are honest rather than uniform: the oak's is well documented, the beech's is an estimate from girth, and each page says which is which.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.