The Oak of Erica

This village was made by digging peat, and the oak is about as old as the village. Erica began around 1863 as a buckwheat colony on the higher sandy ground, the kind of marginal settlement people started where nothing better was available. It became a proper peat colony when the Hoogeveense Vaart, the canal, was completed in the same period, and the centre of the place shifted to sit on the water. The address of this tree still says it: Verlengde Vaart Zuidzijde, the south side of the extended canal. Peat colonies were built to strip the ground. Men cut the bog, dried it, and sent it out by barge, and when the peat was gone what was left was thin sand and a grid of canals. Almost nothing planted in that first generation survived, because there was no reason to keep it. This oak was planted between 1870 and 1880 in a front garden, which is exactly why it did. A tree in somebody's own garden had a defender. It is a private front garden on a canal bank. Look from the road.