Den Olifant

Den Olifant is ten metres tall and may have passed 250 years, and those two facts are the same fact. Somebody pollarded this oak for generations, cutting the head back to the same knuckle every few years, which is how an old tree ends up the height of a young one while its trunk keeps thickening. It stands where four cadastral parcels meet in the Paalbos, most likely along an old parish boundary, with boundary stones surviving nearby. Before it was scenery it was a legal instrument, a thing you could point at when the argument was about where one parish stopped and the next began. Then the cutting stopped. One limb that had never been taken back to the knuckle carried on growing and went out almost horizontally, which is where the local name comes from: the Elephant, presumably for a limb that reads as a trunk or a tusk. Flanders' heritage inventory measured it in April 2015 at 273 centimetres round and ten metres tall, with a crown only six metres across, and will go no further on its age than to say that 250 years or more is not out of the question, judged by setting its girth against other oaks in the same wood. Flanders protected it outright as a monument the following year.