The Town Hall Plane

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.