The Tulip Tree Grove at Kasteel Groeneveld

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.