Welcher ist der älteste Baum in Leiden?

Leiden's oldest-tree claim rests on unusually good paperwork: the Hortus Botanicus has a dated planting record naming Herman Boerhaave, the seed's origin in Virginia and even the London merchant who shipped it, which is why the Tulip Tree of Boerhaave anchors this page with more confidence than most European cities can offer for anything close to 300 years old. The garden's date-plum, recorded as 1740, comes next, and its Golden Chain Tree very nearly beat both: a popular story once dated it to 1601 until the Hortus's own archival research debunked that in the 1930s and settled on the 1720s instead, a rare case of an institution correcting its own legend downward rather than letting it stand. Most of the others come from the national monumental tree register, which records a planting decade rather than a year, so several ages on this page are given as bands of twenty to fifty years instead of single dates. Two trees are honestly in trouble: the Beets Beech on the Burcht mound and the beech at Groenesteeg cemetery are both fighting root fungus, the second under active treatment by its caretakers. None of that changes what each of them has already lived through.