The Oak by the Wilhelmina Monument

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.