The Pedunculate Oak of the Weizigtpark

Nobody has counted this oak's rings. The national monumental tree register dates it to between 1820 and 1830, and it reached that band by counting the rings of the tree that stood beside it, one of the same generation, after that one was felled. The oak's age, roughly 195 to 205 years, is inherited from a neighbour that is no longer there. It grows in the wooded strip that runs along the railway at the edge of the Weizigtpark, about five hundred metres from Dordrecht station. The city rebuilt Weizigt in 2024, redoing the paths, the water and the banks, and the strip along the tracks still carries its mature trees. That makes this oak the third stop on a walk that already had two: the silver maple stands about 170 metres away and the pond cypress about 265, all three inside the same park and all three on the register. Pedunculate oaks of two centuries are common enough in the Netherlands that one rarely gets a plaque. What is uncommon here is the paperwork. The register does not pretend to a measurement it never made; it writes down whose rings were counted, and that the tree they belonged to is gone. Nobody has examined this oak in its own right, so the age stays a band rather than a year.