De Gevlekte Zuiderling

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.