Maastricht's most remarkable trees sit on the edges of the things that shaped the city: a chestnut on a working farm above Amby, a grove of giant sequoias in a cemetery that has taken the city's dead since 1812, and a stand of 300-year-old oaks marking the outline of a baron's star-shaped forest garden above Kasteel Neercanne. Closer to the centre, Stadspark, one of the oldest city parks in the Netherlands, holds the country's tallest recorded plane tree alongside three beeches nearly as old as the park's own 19th-century layout.
0 / 19 in Maastricht besucht
1
The Sweet Chestnut of Molenweg
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · disputed, likely 250-275 years · Amby
Nobody can say exactly when this tree was planted, and the people who study it are refreshingly honest about that. Standing beside the entrance gate of the Prickaerts family farm in Amby, this sweet chestnut has a trunk 25 metres tall and, as of a 2021 measurement, just over six metres around, up from 5.25 metres when first recorded in 1986. The national tree register estimates it was planted between 1750 and 1800; a 2022 assessment by Monumental Trees suggested 1800, plus or minus 40 years. A persistent local story credits Russian Cossack troops with planting it during the 1814 blockade of Maastricht, but researchers who looked into Cossack military behaviour during that campaign found the tale, in their own words, highly unrealistic, and no supporting evidence has ever surfaced. Only a dendrochronological core sample would settle the question with any precision, and none had been taken as of the most recent published research, part of an ongoing joint study between the Bomenstichting and Wageningen University sampling several of Maastricht's oldest trees. Until that happens, this chestnut carries its age the same way it carries its twisted, weather-beaten trunk: honestly, and without pretending to a certainty nobody has actually earned.
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2
The Giant Sequoias of Tongerseweg
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · about 150 years · Wyckerpoort
Some of the honour squares in Maastricht's oldest surviving cemetery were planted not with the usual yews or cypresses but with giant sequoias, a species native to a single mountain range in California and almost never found in a 19th-century Dutch burial ground. The cemetery itself has taken Maastricht's dead since 1812, making it one of the oldest municipal cemeteries in the Netherlands, and its brick chapel and the towering sequoias are what most visitors remember. The largest measures 6.85 metres around and 36.6 metres tall, roughly 150 years old, among the thickest specimens of its kind recorded anywhere in the country, though no longer the tallest: other Dutch sequoias have since overtaken it in height while it kept adding girth instead. Planting a species built to eventually reach 90 metres and outlive the Roman Empire in a graveyard designed for individual human memory is its own quiet statement, whether or not the 19th-century planners intended it that way. The cemetery, now a national heritage monument holding more than a thousand trees in total, remains open to visitors during normal hours, sequoias included.
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3
The 1700 Oaks of Cannerbos
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 300 years · Sint Pieter
A baron's coat of arms is the reason this forest has straight lines running through it at all. Around 1700, Baron Daniel Wolfgang van Dopff, who had just built Kasteel Neercanne into the hillside beside it, laid out the slope forest above his new estate as a sterrenbos, a half-star pattern of radiating paths that echoed the half-star on his own family crest, complete with a belvedere, a tea house and a temple of love at the centre where the paths converged. Oaks, elms, beeches and alders went into the ground as part of that original planting scheme. The formal star layout did not survive the 19th century, when neglect let the forest grow back into something closer to ordinary woodland, but a number of oaks along and around the forest's edge are still standing from that first planting, roughly 300 years old today, the clearest physical trace left of Van Dopff's geometric ambition. Kasteel Neercanne itself, built into an old marl quarry, still stands beside the forest and today operates as a restaurant and hotel, while the wooded slope above it remains open, publicly accessible walking terrain.
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4
The Three Oldest Beeches of Stadspark
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · about 160 years · Jekerdal
Stadspark's own marked walking route names these three beeches, standing together partway along the Jeker, as the oldest trees in a park that otherwise holds more than 1,400 of them. At around 160 years, they date to the park's main 19th-century expansion rather than to its far older origins: Stadspark traces its beginnings to a linden planting in 1648 and a formal walking path laid out from 1706, but none of those 17th and early 18th-century originals are known to have survived into the present, so these beeches, planted as the various sub-parks along the Jeker were laid out through the 1800s, are as far back as anyone can point with confidence today. The park itself is one of the oldest continuous city parks in the Netherlands, a 10-hectare green belt running along the Jeker and the old fortification walls, now home to roughly 800 trees across some 160 species from across the world, including a ginkgo, a tulip tree, silver limes and an American yellowwood elsewhere on the same route. The three beeches remain the route's own answer to the obvious question a visitor would ask first: which of all this is the oldest.
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5
The Tallest Plane Tree in the Netherlands
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 154 years · Jekerdal
Three plane trees grow in a row beside Van Heylerhofflaan on Stadspark's edge, planted together around 1870, and one of the three has since measured 39 metres tall, the tallest plane tree ever recorded in the Netherlands. Its two companions are barely shorter, at 37.5 and 36.5 metres, which makes the whole trio a small, accidental grove of national height records rather than a single freak specimen. None of the three is the thickest tree in Stadspark, a title that belongs to a separate, unrelated plane elsewhere in the park, a reminder that height and girth are different competitions and a tree can win one without the other. Planted during the same 19th-century wave of park-building that gave Stadspark most of its current character, this row has had roughly a century and a half of steady, undisturbed growth along a riverside strip of ground with nothing overhead to compete with for light, which is likely the plainest explanation for why it, rather than an older or more storied plane elsewhere in the country, holds the record today.
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6
The Juliana Birth Linden
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · ~120 years · Centrum
This lime was planted on Keizer Karelplein to mark the birth of Princess Juliana in April 1909, the future queen who would go on to reign over the Netherlands for 32 years, and the tree still carries a small royal fence around its base. What that fence does not carry is any mention of Juliana at all: the register notes, with some evident amusement, that the ironwork skips the commemoration entirely and instead repeats a single instruction six times over, no bicycles.
The tree stands at Keizer Karelplein, one of three squares that ring the Basilica of Saint Servaas, Maastricht's oldest surviving church and the burial place of the city's first bishop. Juliana herself never had any particular connection to Maastricht beyond the timing of her birth, which was enough in 1909 for a municipality to plant a tree and forget, or simply never get around to, actually saying why. It stands in the open square today, free to see, a two minute walk from a second monumental linden on the neighbouring Vrijthof.
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7
The Linden of Vrijthof
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · ~140 years · Centrum
Vrijthof takes its name from the churchyard it once was, the free forecourt of the Basilica of Saint Servaas that doubled as a burial ground through the Middle Ages, before it became the wide public square that now hosts Maastricht's Christmas market and biggest outdoor terraces. Archaeological digs beneath the paving have turned up Roman infrastructure and early medieval graves, so the square's actual history runs back roughly two thousand years even though almost nothing visible on it does.
This common lime, dated by the register to around 1880 to 1890, is one of the square's more recent arrivals by that measure, standing beside what was once the rijkswacht building at the square's edge. Common lime is itself a hybrid, a natural cross between the small-leaved and large-leaved lime that was the default civic tree across Dutch and Belgian cities for centuries. It grows in the open square, free, a two minute walk from a second commemorative linden on the neighbouring Keizer Karelplein, both sharing the same historic church complex without either predating it by more than a fraction.
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8
The Black Walnuts of Nolenspark
Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) · ~130 years · Jekerdal
Maastricht's Stadspark grew westward in 1886, absorbing the ground that became Monseigneur Nolenspark and Henri Hermanspark, under the design of Lievin Rosseels, son of the Leuven landscape architect Egidius Rosseels who had laid out the park's earlier southward expansion in the 1860s. This group of black walnuts, an American species grown here for its wood and its nuts rather than any native pedigree, most likely went into the ground during that same 1886 westward push, though no record fixes the planting to a specific year.
The walnuts share the park with a run of other trees from the same expansion, weeping silver limes along the water, a pair of tulip trees, and the row of planes further along Van Heylerhofflaan that includes the tallest recorded plane in the Netherlands, all part of one coordinated late-19th-century planting scheme rather than separate additions over time. They stand in the open park, free, on ground that was still farmland or open country before Rosseels arrived to make it a park.
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9
The Weeping Silver Limes of Haet ende Nijt
Weeping Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa 'Pendula') · ~160 years · Jekerdal
Haet ende Nijt, Hate and Envy, is the pointedly named moated monument at the heart of Stadspark's western reach, and when Lievin Rosseels redesigned this stretch of the park in 1886 he deliberately removed the five-sided earthen bank that had partly enclosed it, so that the monument would sit fully surrounded by water and read more clearly from the paths around it. This group of weeping silver limes grows along that same bank, planted a little earlier, the register dates them to the 1860s, during the park's first southward expansion rather than the later westward one.
Weeping silver lime is a cultivated, downward-branching form of the ordinary silver lime, its leaves silvery on the underside and prone to catching wind in a way that makes the whole canopy shimmer, a trait 19th-century park designers prized enough to plant it beside water on purpose. The trees stand in the open along the bank, free, one stop among several from the same era, the black walnuts and tulip trees a short walk further into the same park.
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10
The Tulip Trees of Nolenspark
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · ~140 years · Jekerdal
These two tulip trees likely went into Monseigneur Nolenspark during the same 1886 westward expansion of Maastricht's Stadspark that brought in the park's black walnuts and its weeping silver limes along the Haet ende Nijt bank, all under Lievin Rosseels' design. Nobody recorded the exact planting year for this pair specifically, so the register places them in the same general period as the rest of the expansion rather than on a dated line of its own.
Tulip tree is not related to the tulip at all, named only for flowers shaped like the bulb, and it is one of the tallest-growing hardwoods in eastern North America, capable of well over 50 metres in its native range even if Dutch specimens rarely approach that. Its leaves have a distinctive squared-off tip, unlike almost any other tree grown in Europe, which makes it one of the easiest species in this park to identify at a glance even without a label. The pair stands in the open near Van Heylerhofflaan, free, close enough to Stadspark's record-holding plane row and the park's other 1880s plantings to make one stop worth several.
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11
The Pagoda Tree of Harrie van Haaren
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum 'Harrie van Haaren') · about 108 years · Jekerkwartier
The cultivar is named after the man who first noticed this tree comes out the wrong colour. Japanese pagoda trees leaf out green. This one opens white and gold, a habit the Dutch dendrologist Harrie van Haaren (1925-1990) was the first to describe, and the reason his name is attached to it.
Its own paperwork argues about its age. The national register of monumental trees files it under a planting band of 1880 to 1890, while the history note inside that same record states flatly that it went in the ground in 1918, and an independent Dutch tree archive says 1918 as well. Two sources against one field, so read it as about 108 years old and treat the 1880s band as a slip of the pen.
It stands in the northern half of Aldenhofpark, the section laid out in 1918 by the Rosseels family of landscape architects; the western half has been an English-style landscape park since 1837. Around it, Maastricht's Stadspark green belt holds some fifteen officially designated monumental trees, and this is one of only two pagoda trees among them, listed in the register's top honour class.
What nobody has done is put a tape around it. No girth or height is recorded anywhere we can find. If you have measured it, tell us.
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12
The Caucasian Wingnut and Weeping Silver Lime of Waldeckpark
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) and Weeping Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa 'Pendula') · about 100 years · Biesland
Two trees, ten metres apart, one stop. The Caucasian wingnut is the one that stops people: through early summer it hangs ropes of winged green seeds, the longest of them about the length of your forearm, which is not something the oaks and limes of a Dutch city park do.
Neither tree stands on natural ground. Waldeckpark was laid out in 1921 on the Waldeck bastion, a piece of Maastricht's demolished fortifications, by the Haarlem landscape architect Leonard Springer, who worked in the romantic manner: a rose avenue, the old fortification ruins left standing as ornament, and specimen trees put where people would walk past them. The wingnut is recorded as part of that original scheme, and Springer planted a pair of them. Only one of the two has been located again.
Beside it grows a weeping silver lime, a cultivar that builds a broad dome and then lets its outer branches hang to the ground, flashing the pale undersides of its leaves whenever the wind gets in. That one we can only find in the national monumental tree register, with no second source naming it, so it rests on thinner evidence than its neighbour. The register puts both in the 1920s, which makes them roughly a century old.
They sit at the Tongerseweg edge of the park, on city land, with no gate and nothing to pay.
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13
The Golden Rain Tree of Aldenhofpark
Golden Rain Tree (Koelreuteria paniculata) · about 100 years · Jekerkwartier
It flowers in July, which is the point of it. Almost every tree in a Dutch park has finished flowering by midsummer; the golden rain tree waits, then covers itself in loose yellow panicles for weeks. What follows is stranger. The spent flowers become papery three-sided lanterns, pink turning to brown, hollow with a seed rattling inside, and they hang on well past the point where the leaves have gone orange and dropped.
The Dutch call it the lampionboom, the lantern tree, and it comes from China and Korea. That is roughly why it is here: the national register of monumental trees lists it on dendrological grounds, which is the designation given to a tree that earns protection for what it is rather than for anything it has witnessed.
It is also, honestly, the whole of what is known. The register puts it at about a century old and records no history for it, no girth and no height, and we found no walking route, article or archive that names a golden rain tree in Aldenhofpark. So this one is a register entry with a real tree at the end of it, standing in the north section of the park on city ground that is open at any hour. If you know its story, we would like to hear it.
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14
The Sweet Gum of Waldeckpark
Sweet Gum (Liquidambar styraciflua) · about 100 years · Biesland
Its Latin name means liquid amber, and it earned it: cut the bark of a sweet gum and it bleeds a fragrant resin that North Americans chewed like gum and burned like incense. The leaf looks like a maple's, five points and a long stalk, and the tree is not remotely a maple. It is a cousin of witch hazel, and it holds its colour later into the year than almost anything else standing in Waldeckpark.
When it was planted is a question the paperwork itself hedges. The national register of monumental trees notes that it was most likely put in when Leonard Springer laid out this park in 1921, and most likely is the register's own wording rather than ours. Springer's design is documented: a romantic layout on the demolished Waldeck bastion, with a rose avenue and the old fortification ruins left in place. Whether this particular tree belongs to that planting is not recorded anywhere we could reach, so call it roughly a hundred years old and leave the rest open.
No girth or height has been published for it either. It stands near the roundabout at the western end of the park, on city ground, free and open. Somebody with a tape measure could improve this entry in ten minutes.
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15
The Tulip Tree of Proosdijpark
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · roughly a century old · Meerssen village centre
The tulip tree is not a European tree at all. It belongs to the forests of the eastern United States, where it grows taller than almost anything else that drops its leaves in winter, and this one has spent roughly the last century doing it in a village park in Limburg, ten minutes on foot from Meerssen station.
It hides its best trick in plain sight. In June the crown fills with greenish-yellow cups streaked orange at the base, shaped near enough like tulips to have named the species, and held so high that most people walk under a flowering tree without seeing a single flower. The leaves settle the identification from the ground: four lobes and a flat top, as though someone took scissors to the tip. In October the whole crown turns clear yellow.
Its age is softer than it looks written down. The register that records this tree puts the planting at around 1900 and marks even that with a question mark, so call it a century and leave room on either side. Nobody has put a tape around the trunk either. If you know when it went in, tell us.
It stands in the Proosdijpark, a listed monument site in the middle of the village, free and open, on the side towards the kerksteeg.
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16
The Japanese Maple of Waldeckpark
Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum) · over a century old · Waldeckpark
The national register puts this Japanese maple in the planting years 1910 to 1920. The park around it was laid out in 1921. Both statements come from good sources and nobody has reconciled them: either the maple was already standing on the old Bastion Waldeck before Leonard Springer drew his park over the demolished fortification, or the register's decade band is simply loose. Worth knowing, and not yet written down anywhere.
What the band does give is a bracket of roughly 106 to 116 years, which is a long life for Acer palmatum. The species is a slow, small tree, planted across Europe since the nineteenth century as a garden ornament and rarely allowed to get old; most of the Japanese maples anyone has met are shrubs you can see over the top of. This one has had a century in municipal ground, which is why the register marks it as dendrologically notable rather than merely present.
It is also, so far, a tree only one source names. Waldeckpark and the Stadspark it adjoins hold more than 800 trees between them across some 160 species, and the histories of the park describe that collection without singling this specimen out. It stands with the park's Caucasian wingnut, golden rain tree and sweet gum, four trees in a few minutes of walking.
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17
The Plane Tree of Sint-Servaasbron
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 120 years · Biesland / Jekerdal
The legend, recorded in the Middle Ages by Henric van Veldeke, has Saint Servatius striking the ground here with his staff on his way home from Rome, and a spring rising where it landed. A woman with a fever was said to have been cured by the water. People have been coming down to it ever since, and a procession still walks here every May.
What you actually find at the bottom of the little stairway is nineteenth-century: a stone well under a wrought-iron canopy with a statue of the saint above it, built between 1886 and 1888 and now a national monument in its own right. The plane standing over it is dated by the national register to the planting years 1900 to 1910, roughly 120 years, so tree and stonework are near contemporaries. Whether the tree went in as part of that work, nobody recorded.
The ground belongs to a religious institution, but the gate is a decorative Louis XV affair that stands unlocked, the register marks the tree as visitable, and the site is walked by the public year round. The spring itself is less reliable than the tree: a recent visitor account found it dry.
The plane has company. Chestnuts and elder crowd the hollow, and the register lists a grove of 23 maples and horse chestnuts at the same coordinates, dated 1860 to 1870. Only the plane carries a name.
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18
The Plane Trees of Mgr. Nolenspark
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 140 years · Mgr. Nolenspark
Maastricht's most famous plane tree, the tallest in the Netherlands, stands about 240 metres from these three, and nobody has ever put an age on it. This trio does have one, of a sort. The national register places them in the planting years 1880 to 1890, roughly 136 to 146 years, and its own history note says they presumably date from the 1886 expansion that carried the Stadspark westward into Mgr. Nolenspark and Henri Hermanspark. Presumably is the register's own word and it is the honest one: the expansion is documented, the year these three went into the ground is not.
Three planes of one generation standing together read differently from a single record-breaker. This is a stand rather than a specimen, the kind of planting a nineteenth-century park designer made because the London plane took coal smoke, compacted soil and hard pruning better than anything else available, and because a row of them would eventually close overhead.
No source beyond the register names these three individually, which is the one thin part of their paperwork. Everything around them is better documented and closer than you would expect: the park's black walnuts, its weeping silver limes and its pair of tulip trees all stand within about a hundred metres, so the whole group is ten minutes of walking.
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19
The Ginkgo of Mgr. Nolenspark
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · about 110 years · Jekerdal
The Dutch register that protects this tree calls it a Japanse notenboom, literally a Japanese nut tree, which is simply the ordinary Dutch name for a ginkgo and has nothing to do with what it actually is. A ginkgo is not a nut tree in any real sense. It is the sole survivor of a whole order of plants that otherwise vanished tens of millions of years ago, a living link to trees that grew alongside dinosaurs and outlasted them.
This particular specimen is comparatively young. The national monumental tree register dates it to sometime between 1910 and 1920, which puts it at around a hundred and ten years old, the municipality as its owner, and open access for visitors. A ginkgo of that age has already seen the species become one of the most planted street trees on earth, prized for surviving pollution, disease and, most famously, six specimens close to the blast at Hiroshima that leafed out again the following spring.
It stands in Monseigneur Nolenspark, in the stretch of Maastricht Stadspark that Lievin Rosseels laid out in 1886, sharing its hundred metres of ground with the park's own black walnuts, weeping silver limes and tulip trees. The register is the only source naming a ginkgo at this exact spot, so the page says that plainly rather than borrowing the measurements of two other Maastricht ginkgos documented elsewhere in the wider park. They are not this tree.
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