The Giant Sequoia of the Wielewaal Pinetum

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.