The Limes of Kasteel Nijenrode

A pair of limes has stood on the castle square of Kasteel Nijenrode long enough that two independent sources describe them in nearly identical words: visible from the park, from inside the castle, from the public road and from the river Vecht. Neither source needs the gate open to make that claim, because the trees face outward across a public road and a public river. Ages disagree by more than a century. A 2022 newspaper piece nominating the pair for the Netherlands' top 50 trees says they have defined the castle's appearance for 270 years, putting the planting around 1752. A separate heritage record gives a much wider planting band, 1650 to 1750, which would make the older end of the pair closer to 376 years old today. Nobody has resolved the gap with a core sample, so both figures are recorded rather than picked between. Kasteel Nijenrode itself is a moated, late-medieval castle, rebuilt across the centuries and now home to a business university rather than a family. Its walled courtyard carries an 18th-century marble rooster on a stone base, visible past the trees from the roadside. The honest way to see this pair is from the water or the Straatweg embankment, where the view has apparently looked much the same for two and a half centuries.