The Giant Sequoia of Het Bouwhuis

The farm this tree stands on was first written down in 1536. In that year Jan van Borne, steward of the chapter of St Peter in Utrecht, reported on two holdings in the hamlet of Lonneker: Het Bouwhuis and Het Amelink. The Amelink then belonged to the Jonker van Steinfurt, which is to say the count of Bentheim. So the ground has an unbroken paper trail running back close to five centuries, into a landscape of church chapters and minor German nobility, which is roughly four hundred years before anyone here had heard of a sequoia. The tree is the newcomer, planted somewhere between 1900 and 1910, when a giant sequoia had gone from a spectacular novelty to the standard way of announcing that a country house had grounds. The register notes that Het Bouwhuis is open to the public and that a good many striking trees stand there, which makes this one of the easier estates on this page to simply walk into. A hundred and twenty years is nothing for the species. In California this would be a sapling among trees three thousand years old. Here it is already the biggest thing in the field.