The Mulberries of Nieuwe Veste

A library was built around these trees rather than the other way round. Three black mulberries have grown in this small courtyard since around 1780, when it was still the garden of Huize Ocrum, a manor house owned at the time by Gerrit Willem Motman, steward of the Dutch princely domains. The house came down over the following two centuries as the site changed hands and purpose, but the mulberries stayed, and when architect Herman Hertzberger designed De Nieuwe Veste, Breda's combined library, music school and cultural centre, in the mid-1990s, he folded the new building's plan around the courtyard rather than clear it. The trees now shape the layout of a public building constructed more than two hundred years after they were planted, an unusually literal case of architecture yielding to something already there. At roughly 245 years old they are, as far as any documented planting date in Breda goes, the city's oldest living trees, though the courtyard they stand in is modest and the trees themselves are not large by monumental-tree standards elsewhere in the country. Free to visit during the library's opening hours, they are also one of the few entries on this list a visitor can reach without ever stepping outside.