Delft's oldest tree predates the Netherlands' own royal house by two centuries and still fruits every summer in a working almshouse courtyard. Its youngest tree is a graft from Germany, planted specifically to keep William of Orange's memory rooted in the city where he died. Twelve trees in all, one of them a living link to a 1944 discovery once thought extinct, another a copper beech planted when a canal beside the Nieuwe Kerk was filled in.
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Black Mulberry (Morus nigra subsp. multicaulus) · 319 years · Binnenstad
The black mulberry in the courtyard of Hofje van Pauw has been fruiting since before the Dutch East India Company's Delft chamber was a century old. Tree specialist Jorn Copijn identified it in 2023 as Morus nigra subsp. multicaulus, a subspecies not officially recorded in Europe until 1821, more than a century after this specimen was already growing here. The likely explanation involves no botanist at all: the VOC had traded out of India, where the subspecies originates, since 1700, and Delft kept its own VOC chamber from 1602, so a sea captain or merchant returning home is the more probable route than any recorded introduction. At 319 years old it ranks among the oldest fruit trees documented in the Netherlands. The hofje itself, an almshouse Elisabeth Pauw endowed by testament in 1707 for women who had fallen on hard times, still houses residents today, now adults with intellectual disabilities, and the tree has outlived every one of them. Its courtyard gate on Paardenmarkt stays unlocked during the day. Visitors are asked to keep to the garden and skip the windows, since the houses ringing the tree are still lived in, not a museum.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum and Aesculus x carnea) · 106 years · Binnenstad
Five horse chestnuts on Sint Agathaplein, three white-flowered and two red, have stood outside the building where William of Orange was shot dead since 1920, planted as part of a coordinated square-wide planting rather than growing in on their own. The address carries more history than the trees themselves: Museum Prinsenhof occupies the former convent where William, leader of the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule, was assassinated on the staircase in 1584, and the bullet holes are still in the wall inside. De Boominspecteurs, commissioned by the municipality to assess the square's trees ahead of a major renovation, confirmed the chestnuts as part of the site's protected planting. The renovation itself started in 2025 and is due to finish in 2027, with the museum closed for the duration, and the municipality has stated the square's monumental trees are being kept in the new design even where other, younger planting is not. What that means for a visitor right now is straightforward caution rather than a locked gate: Sint Agathaplein is a public square, but a live building site sits next to it, so the usual free, unrestricted access may be temporarily altered until the work finishes.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · 70 years · Binnenstad
This winter linden did not grow from a seed that fell nearby. It grew from a twig cut from the Wilhelmslinde in Dillenburg, Germany, the tree under which William of Orange spent his childhood before he became the reluctant leader of the Dutch revolt and was assassinated in Delft in 1584. Supporters of the House of Orange took cuttings from the Dillenburg original and planted them at sites tied to William's life, and this one went into the Prinsentuin, the garden beside Museum Prinsenhof, in 1956. It is by a wide margin the youngest tree on this list, not even a century old against the mulberry's three, but it carries the most direct physical link to the man Delft is built around commemorating. The museum grounds are mid-renovation as of 2026, work that started in 2025 and runs to 2027, and the municipality has said the garden's historic trees are being kept rather than cleared for the new design. Until the museum reopens, treat the Prinsentuin as a garden worth checking on rather than one guaranteed open on any given day.
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) · Wippolder
Every dawn redwood alive today, anywhere in the world, descends from a single discovery: a species known only from 150-million-year-old fossils, presumed extinct, until a forester found a living stand of it in a remote Chinese valley in 1944. An international seed-collecting expedition followed in 1947, and botanical gardens across Europe, including several in the Netherlands, raised their first Metasequoia glyptostroboides from that single haul. Two of them now dominate the middle section of TU Delft's Botanic Garden, tall enough to be the garden's own reference point long before a visitor reaches the rarer specimens around them. Nobody recorded the exact planting year for these two, so no source gives a precise age, only the certainty that they belong to the first generation of the species ever grown outside China since its rediscovery, making them roughly seventy to eighty years old by extension rather than by record. The garden charges standard admission and sits a short walk from Delft's main station, a working research collection rather than a park, with the redwoods' feathery, deciduous foliage turning copper in autumn before it drops, unusual for a conifer and part of what first convinced botanists this was something genuinely new.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 130 years · Wateringse Veld / Kalverbos
Three plane trees went into Kalverbos around the years Delft finished the red-brick water tower that still looms over the park. Construction started in 1895, the tower pumped the city's water until 1996 and has since become a venue for parties. The register that protects these trees describes them standing in the same historic setting as the tower, an old bench and the graves nearby, planted as the park found its final shape.
Kalverbos itself began as a cemetery, in use for 46 years before Delft moved its dead to the Jaffalaan in 1874. Its conversion into a public park in 1894, laid out by garden architect Hugo Poortman in the romantic landscape style, gave it the winding paths it still has. These planes, dated to 1890 to 1900, are close to that age, among the first trees to grow up with the park rather than the burial ground it replaced.
London planes are a seventeenth century hybrid of an American and an Asian parent, fast growing and tolerant enough of clipping to survive on a Dutch street. Three of them, standing together at well over a century old, anchor one corner of a park that covers barely a hectare.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 130 years · Nieuwe Plantage
A wingnut gets its name from a seed built with two papery blades, and this one has grown for well over a century on ground that used to be Delft's city wall. The wall came down around 1890, and the register credits the new layout to a landscape architect surnamed Zocher, a name attached to some of the country's best known nineteenth century parks, who chose large, fast-growing species for the reclaimed rampart. That is the register's own account of why this edge of the city carries so many good trees planted at once.
Caucasian wingnuts come from forests around the Black Sea and the Caspian, and they grow faster than almost anything else planted alongside them in a Dutch garden, oaks and limes included. This one was planted between 1890 and 1900, putting it at around 130 years old, on a strip of the old rampart directly across the street from an ordinary Delft address, number 28 Nieuwe Plantage.
Nothing beyond the national monumental tree register has been found to confirm it further. If you know this tree, tell us.
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · 110 years · Nieuwe Plantage
A swamp tree from the American South outlived the psychiatric hospital that once surrounded it. The Sint-Jorisgasthuis stood on this ground for close to 150 years under its older name, Binnengesticht, rebuilt in the 1920s and finally demolished in the 1960s to make way for housing. Its bald cypress, planted somewhere between 1910 and 1920 in what was then the institution's large garden, is one of the few things on the site that survived the building coming down around it.
Bald cypresses are conifers that behave like broadleaf trees, dropping their needles every autumn, which is unusual enough among cone-bearing species that Delft's specimen stands out on a small square that gives no other hint of what stood here for a century and a half. In its native range along the Mississippi and the Gulf coast it grows in standing water and throws up woody knees around its base; on a Dutch street corner it just grows tall.
At around 110 years old, it is the youngest of Delft's newly registered trees and the only witness left to a building nobody living remembers walking into.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 140 years · Oude Delft canal, historic centre
Nothing else on this stretch of the Oude Delft comes close: seen from above, the plane tree at the Botterbrug is one broad round crown spreading over the canal edge, the largest along the water here. It stands in a small municipal garden beside the former girls' orphanage at Oude Delft 116, and the national register of monumental trees lists it as open to visit and visible from the street.
That register is also where its age comes from. It puts the planting somewhere between 1880 and 1890, which makes the tree about 140 years old, give or take a decade. It records nothing else: no story behind the planting, no name of whoever chose the spot, and no measurement of the trunk.
What the tree has lived through is easier to say. It was already well grown when Delft was occupied in 1940, and it has watched well over a century of boats on the canal and walkers crossing the bridge. Like every London plane it sheds its bark in plates, so the trunk is a patchwork of grey, olive and cream.
The register counts it as a single tree standing on its own rather than one of a row. Nobody has published its girth or its height. If you have put a tape measure round it, tell us.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 130-145 years · Nieuwe Plantage, former city rampart
The whole recorded history of this plane tree is one line in the national register: it was planted during the renovation of Delft's city ramparts. The line gives no year. What the register does give is a planting band of 1880 to 1890, which puts the tree at roughly 130 to 145 years old, and that band is the only date anybody has published for it.
It stands where the Nieuwe Plantage meets the Annageer, on the strip of park that now runs along the old rampart line. From above it is one large rounded crown at the junction of the paths, touching its neighbours but plainly its own tree. The register files it under the municipality, in a park setting, open to visit.
In its time on the old wall the tree has stood through the occupation of 1940 to 1945 and well over a century of Delft walking past on its way somewhere else. Like every London plane it sheds its bark in plates, leaving the trunk a patchwork of grey, olive and cream.
It is also the start of a short walk. The elms of Kalverbos stand about 90 metres away, with that park's three planes close beside them. Nobody has published this tree's girth or height; if you have measured it, tell us.
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 155-165 years · Historic centre
The oldest plane on this page is not the London plane that lines Delft's canals but one of its parents. The national register of monumental trees records an oriental plane in the Doelentuin, planted between 1860 and 1870. That makes it about 155 to 165 years old, and by the same register's dates roughly twenty years older than the city's London planes on this page.
The oriental plane comes from south-eastern Europe and western Asia. Crossed with the American sycamore, it gave the world the London plane now planted along streets across Europe. Its leaves give it away: cut deeper, into longer fingers, than the hybrid's.
The register says little else. It lists a single tree in a municipal park garden, open to visit, with its history down as unknown. Three wingnuts planted between 1900 and 1910 stand almost on top of it, and from the air the crowns run together so closely that nobody has matched the register's pin to one of them. The pin here is approximate for that reason, and the leaves are how you find it.
The streets around the garden still carry the vocabulary of a civic guard: Doelenstraat for the shooting range, Schutterstraat for the marksmen, Vaandelstraat for their banner. How a plane from the far side of Europe came to stand among them, the register does not say.
Nobody has published its girth or height. If you have measured it, tell us.
Elm (Ulmus sp.) · 125-135 years · Jaffa cemetery
These elms were grown to be a room rather than a trunk. The national register of monumental trees lists three of them at Jaffa cemetery as prieel elms, prieel being the Dutch word for an arbour, and records their form as weeping. Branches that hang down on every side leave a sheltered space beneath, and that space, not size, is what the register protects them for: it files them under dendrological interest, a rarity of form.
The register puts their planting between 1890 and 1900, so they are roughly 125 to 135 years old. It does not say who planted them or why, and it gives no girth or height.
Simply being an elm in the Netherlands for that long counts for something. Dutch elm disease takes its name from the Dutch scientists who worked out its cause around 1920, and it has been killing elms across Europe ever since. These three were already twenty years or more in the ground when it was named, and the register still lists them.
Jaffa is Delft's municipal cemetery on the Jaffalaan, owned by the city and recorded in the register as open to visit.
Two honest caveats. The register does not say which elm these are, so we list them simply as elm; if you can tell, tell us. And the canopy around them is dense enough that nobody has matched the register's pin to one crown, so the pin is approximate. Look for the weeping branches.
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 105-115 years · Markt, historic centre
This copper beech is what Delft planted after it filled in a canal. Between 1915 and 1920, the national register of monumental trees records, the city filled in part of the water along the Oude and Nieuwe Langedijk to open a better approach to the Markt from the east. The same works cost the city something the register calls het klokje, the little bell, behind the Nieuwe Kerk. And with the new layout came this tree, on the eastern edge of the church garden.
That makes it about 105 to 115 years old, young as monumental trees go. Its claim is the record: few trees in Delft can name the public works that put them where they stand.
The church behind it is the one where the House of Orange buries its dead, William of Orange among them, and its tower looks down the length of the Markt. The beech has spent its whole life in that tower's shadow.
The garden belongs to the church, and the register lists the tree as visible but not open to visit, so this is one to see from the street at the corner of the Oude Langedijk and the Vrouwenregt. In leaf it is not hard to pick out: a copper beech holds its purple-red colour from spring into summer.
The register gives no girth or height. If you know what the klokje was, or have measured the trunk, tell us.