The Oak in the Hoekelum Meadow

A single oak standing alone in a field is one of the most reliable pleasures this country offers, and it is almost always deliberate. Solitary field trees were left or planted for reasons that had nothing to do with looks. Shade for livestock, a marker on a boundary, a fixed point in a landscape without many. What they produce is a shape no woodland tree ever gets: heavy limbs leaving the trunk low down and running out horizontally as far as the wood will bear, a crown far wider than the tree is tall, and clear ground beneath. This one has had that room since about 1830 to 1840, in the meadow in front of Kasteel Hoekelum, with its twin standing close to the house and looking completely different for it. A free-standing oak of nearly two hundred years is also a small ecosystem on its own. Old oaks carry more dependent species than any other tree in northern Europe, several hundred of them, most in the dead wood and the crevices, so the value is in the parts that look neglected. Go in low winter sun, when the whole frame of it is visible from the road.