The Thousand-Year Oak of Doornenburg

The name promises a thousand years and the wood does not deliver them. Growth-ring sampling in 2013 put this oak at 400 to 650 years old. The castle's own page reports that experts in the early nineteenth century judged it 300 to 400 years old at the time, which lands in roughly the same place, and a cross-check gives 522 years give or take 150. Doornenburg calls it the Duizendjarige Eik anyway, and has for generations. A document from 1376 mentions a tree standing here, which says something about the site and nothing definite about this trunk. Locals have also called it Den Ouden Eik and the Uiverboom, the stork tree, for at least two centuries. What is not in dispute is the bulk. The castle measured the trunk at 6.56 metres round in 2021, against an older figure of 5.65, and records it putting on two to five centimetres a year between 2006 and 2021, which is a hollow tree still growing. It is completely hollow, open down one side and now closed with a steel gate against fire and pocket knives, and two thick stubs may be what is left of old pollarding. Height, measured in 2013, is 15 metres. A municipal sign calls it the oldest oak in the Netherlands. An oak at Den Hout is argued for the same title by a forester who studied it, and neither case is settled.