Seasons1 of 4
Crowd trees together and they race each other. The tulip trees planted at Groeneveld between 1912 and 1915 went in as a grove rather than as specimens, around sixty of them standing close, and the competition for light drove them to 33 and 34 metres, among the tallest of their species recorded in the Netherlands. Their trunks are modest by comparison, between 2.7 and 3.1 metres around. They spent everything on going up. The place to stand is the ice cellar. The estate's ijskelder, a brick chamber dug to hold winter ice through the summer, sits at the foot of the three tallest, and it now serves as a hibernation roost for bats. Above it the grove closes over your head. There is a catch to a tulip tree this tall, and the local nature society states it plainly. The flowers, green and orange and genuinely tulip-shaped, open so high in the crown that most visitors only ever see them after they have fallen. In June, look down. This entry is a grove, not a single stem, so come for one destination rather than one trunk. The original planting is around 113 years old; smaller trees mixed in among them are later infill, and the pin marks the ice cellar rather than any individual tree.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Near the ijskelder (ice cellar), park of Kasteel Groeneveld, Groeneveld 52, Baarn
You can recognise it by the grove of some sixty tulip trees closing overhead, tallest at 33 to 34 metres. It stands over the ijskelder, the brick ice cellar in Kasteel Groeneveld's park, now home to hibernating bats.
Free, public Staatsbosbeheer estate park; walkable outside the castle's own opening hours too
Bus from Baarn or Hilversum station to Groeneveld/Amsterdamsestraatweg stop, then short walk; no direct train station on site
In bloomAutumn colour
late October and November, when sixty crowns turn clear yellow at once
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
