What is the oldest tree in Emmen?
The oldest tree in Emmen is a Dutch lime at the Noordeind, opposite number 9, which the national register places in a planting band of 1750 to 1800 and suggests may have gone in around 1790. The Noordeind is the oldest part of Emmen, which began as an esdorp, a village organised around a shared arable field, on the southeastern shoulder of the Hondsrug. The characteristic Drenthe farmhouses that stood along it are largely gone. A lime at the heart of an old Drenthe village is not decoration: a village lime was a meeting place, a shade tree and often the point at which local business was done, which is why so many of them outlived the buildings around them.
Ages here come from the Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen, which records a planting decade rather than a year, so every figure on this page is a band. The register is the 2024 edition and is the single source for all but the Coevorden maple, which carries a second, so everything here is flagged. For two of these trees the age matters less than it seems, because their interest is not their age: the oaks at the hunebedden are recent by comparison with what they stand on, which is neolithic. Nothing on this page is anywhere near as old as the stones, and the pages say so rather than borrowing the tomb's age for the tree. Two true facts standing next to each other do not make a third. Access is worth reading: several of these trees stand in front gardens and parish grounds that the register records as visitable but which are not public parks, so behave accordingly, and where a pin is marked approximate we know the site and not the trunk.
One of Emmen's trees also appears in Autumn Worth the Trip.