The Oak at the Gate of Antonius Kerkhof

This oak is the first tree anyone meets walking into the Antonius kerkhof, standing just inside the gate beside the old caretaker's house. It was only recently added to the national tree register, which is a different thing from being recently planted: it has stood here since sometime in the 1920s, a full century, and simply went unrecorded until somebody finally looked. The churchyard it guards belonged to a parish nicknamed the Steentjeskerk, briefly independent from the older Trudo parish from 1919 until the two merged back together in 1977. Burials stopped here in 2007, urns only since, but the gate still opens daily and the oak still does the job an entrance tree does anywhere: mark the threshold, offer shade to whoever pauses before going further in. Further in stand a box elder and a group of three Nordmann firs, both also drawn from the same register and both worth the same short walk. None of the three has much written about it beyond the register that designates it, which is the honest state of a small churchyard nobody has thought to study closely, only to protect.