The Norway Maple of Bastion Oranje

This Norway maple grows on top of two-metre-thick fortress walls built in 1634, the year the Dutch States Army needed a new bastion to close a gap in Den Bosch's defences after capturing the city five years earlier. A windmill stood on the bastion for most of its working life; when it came down between 1880 and 1890, landscape architect J.M. Marechal was already laying out the site as one of several former bastions turned into public parks, following the 1874 law that stripped the city's walls of their military status. The municipal tree register puts this maple at roughly 120 years old, the oldest individually measured tree on the bastion today, with a girth over four metres. A second, slightly younger Norway maple grows nearby on the same earthwork, which is likely why older records disagree about which species belongs to which tree here. What both maples share is the ground under them: the earthen rampart that once absorbed cannon fire now just needs mowing, and the Bastionder, an underground exhibition on the city's fortifications, sits below the park the trees grow in.