Eindhoven's old trees are mostly Philips trees. A horse chestnut planted in 1909 because the company believed staff worked better with something green to look at, now at gate 11 of the stadium. An oak in twenty five hectares Anton Philips gave to the city in 1920. A sequoia in the pinetum on the estate his son lived on until 2005, shut for a century and opened in September 2025. The two that owe Philips nothing are the oldest and the best loved: a beech from before the industrial town, and an oak the neighbours light every December.
0 of 7 visited in Eindhoven
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The Philips Tree
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · about 117 years, from a documented planting in 1909 · Philipsdorp
It has 470 square metres of ground reserved for its roots, in a city centre, next to a football stadium. That is the detail worth knowing: somebody drew a line on a map and decided nothing would ever be built inside it.
Anton Philips had the chestnut planted in 1909 in Philipsdorp, the neighbourhood his company was about to build for its workers. The reasoning was not sentimental. Philips believed staff performed better with something green around them, and the tree went in a year before the first houses did.
So it is older than the district, older than the stadium beside it, and older than the club that plays there, which the company founded in 1913. The houses went up around it, the ground was cleared for the ground, the stands grew, and the chestnut kept its square.
On a match day forty thousand people walk past it and most of them do not look up. Gate 11 is the one to aim for. It is the tree standing in its own patch of open ground while everything else is paving.
Horse chestnuts flower in candles in May and drop conkers in September, which in this spot means several thousand people kicking them across a car park.
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2
De Gevlekte Zuiderling
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 200 years by the national register, closer to 265 by the foundation that named it · Tongelre
On the night of 28 July 2022 three teenagers set this tree on fire. The brigade put it out, the bark and the base of the trunk were charred through, and arborists put its chances of surviving at thirty percent. What they could not tell was whether the heat had cooked the sap flow, and the answer would not be visible until the spring of 2024.
It came back. Thirty strong shoots pushed up from the ground around the trunk, and rather than clear them a specialist began weaving them together, using an American technique, into a living scaffold that will hold the old trunk up as it rots over the next thirty years. A crowdfunder raised eleven thousand euro. The burnt platform around the base was cut away by hand so the roots were not disturbed.
It stands 28 metres tall with a trunk eight metres round at the base, in the park of a castle that was demolished in 1872. In October 2009 it became the first Wereldboom in the Netherlands.
Its age is disputed. The foundation that named it says planted around 1760; the national register says the 1820s. Nobody has cored it.
Go and look at the black trunk and the young growth climbing it.
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3
The Oak of De Wielewaal
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 170 to 180 years, from the register's planting band of 1850 to 1860 · Strijp
For a hundred years you could not come here. This was the private estate of Frits Philips, who built the house in 1934 and lived in it until he died in 2005, on land his father Anton had bought in 1912 when it was a farm called Het Zwarte Huis. The city bought the whole thing in 2022 for twenty nine million euro and opened it to the public on 27 September 2025.
It is 144 hectares, three times the size of the Vondelpark, and entry is free.
This oak was already standing when Anton Philips arrived. In 1850 the ground here was open heath; it was planted up over the second half of the century, and by 1897 the map showed pine wood cut through by avenues of oak. This is one of those avenue trees, which is why it is a good deal older than most of what surrounds it.
The estate is large enough that the pin marks the surveyed position rather than a spot you can stand on and be certain. Come in from Oirschotsedijk and follow the old avenue lines; they are still legible in the way the wood is laid out, and the oaks along them are the thick ones.
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4
The Giant Sequoia of the Wielewaal Pinetum
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · roughly 105 to 115 years, from the register's planting band of 1910 to 1920 · Strijp
In 1912 Anton Philips bought a farm on the heath and immediately started collecting conifers. He laid out a pinetum, a star wood with paths radiating from a single point, a maze and a rockery, which tells you what kind of man he was about land: it was to be arranged.
This is one of the trees from that planting, a giant sequoia, a species from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada that had been in European gardens for about sixty years when it went in here. In California they are the largest living things on earth. In a Brabant pinetum a hundred-year-old one is a tall, red-brown column with bark you can push your fist into, soft and fibrous and thick enough to have evolved against forest fire.
It has a long way to go. Sequoias run to three thousand years and this one is barely out of its first century, which is the pleasant thing about standing under it: on its own timescale, the entire Philips story happened this morning.
The pinetum is signposted from the Oirschotsedijk entrance. Look for the conifer that is obviously wider than everything around it.
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5
The Oak by the Wilhelmina Monument
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 170 to 180 years, from the register's planting band of 1850 to 1860 · Strijp
In 1920 Anton Philips and his wife Anna de Jongh gave twenty five hectares of wood to the people of Eindhoven. They had bought it as pine plantation in 1912, turned it into something you could walk in, and handed it over after the neighbouring municipality of Strijp was absorbed into the city. The garden architect D. F. Tersteeg laid it out in the English landscape manner, grass opening into stands of trees, and it opened as a park in 1924.
This oak was there before any of that. The register puts it in the 1850s, which makes it sixty years older than the purchase and a survivor of whatever stood here when the ground was still being planted up from heath.
That is worth holding in mind while you look at it. The park is a designed thing, made by a company for its workers and then given away. The oak is not part of the design. It was simply already standing where somebody later decided to put a path.
It stands to the left of the path running to the Wilhelmina monument. The park was fully renovated in 2009, so the surroundings are tidier than the tree.
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6
The Copper Beech of the Glorieuxpark
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 275 to 325 years, from the register's planting band of 1700 to 1750 · Stratum
This is the oldest thing standing in Eindhoven, by a wide margin and by the register's own dating: a planting band of 1700 to 1750, so somewhere between about 275 and 325 years. Everything else on this page is a Philips tree. This one was full grown before the family arrived.
The ground has changed hands and purpose repeatedly around it. It was the Eikenburg estate; in 1894 the Brothers of Charity bought it and opened a boys' boarding school, adding pavilions over the decades; the boarding school closed in 1996 for lack of pupils, and care and education organisations moved into the buildings. The main house, the old school, the chapel and a mounted statue of Saint George are all listed national monuments. A religious order still owns the park, and the register records it as visitable.
One honest note. This park also held the thickest beech in the whole of North Brabant, and it is gone: a large part of its crown came down on its own in September 2013 and the remaining trunk was taken out. That was a different tree, a green beech, and the register recorded this one eleven years afterwards. If you go and find this one has followed it, tell us.
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7
De Lichtjesboom
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 100 to 110 years, from the register's planting band of 1920 to 1930 · Gijzenrooi
Every December the neighbourhood covers this oak in fairy lights, and keeps them on through January. It is not a municipal display and nobody is paid to do it. That is why the street knows it as the lichtjesboom, the little lights tree, rather than by anything the register calls it.
The rest of the year it is a good ordinary oak of about a century, standing clear of the houses in the strip of planting along the Diepmeerven, well enough placed that you see the whole shape of it from the pavement. The street name probably points at the Diepe Meerven, a small heath pool a way off toward Heeze, which is what this whole district was before it was a district.
It is the smallest tree on this page and the only one on it because of what people do with it. Eindhoven is a city that thinks about light more than most, having spent a century making it, and the version that matters here is a hundred bulbs strung through an oak by people who live on the street.
Go in December. In August you will see an oak.
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