The Oak of Landgoed Frieswijk

The register is honest about this one in a way that is worth quoting: the planting history is not known, and the oak was probably put in during the first half of the nineteenth century. That is the ordinary state of most old trees. No document, no planting record, nobody who wrote it down, and a dating arrived at by looking at the tree and at what was happening on the estate around it. It is worth seeing that stated plainly, because the confident specific ages attached to famous trees usually rest on no more than this and simply do not admit it. What can be said is that Frieswijk is an estate northeast of Deventer, that the oak stands about 125 metres south of the Raalterweg, and that a pedunculate oak of two centuries in this country is at roughly half its span. Oak on this ground is the default rather than the exception, which is part of why it goes unrecorded. Somebody planted it because you planted oak, and then two hundred years passed. It is a walk out of town and the best reason to go is the walk. Come in October for the acorns.