The Hungarian Oak of the Oosterbegraafplaats

The register does not only call this oak old, it says which decade of the cemetery it belongs to. Gedenkpark De Ooster opened in 1899, its northern section was added in 1929, and the Bomenstichting dates this Hungarian oak to that extension, which puts it at roughly a hundred years. The register throws in one detail worth having on the walk: the seam between the old ground and the new is still legible in the layout, and this tree stands on the new side of it. Quercus frainetto belongs to southern Italy, the Balkans and Thrace. In a cemetery in Twente it is a deliberate import, and somebody chose it over the beeches and oaks that would have been the easy answer. It has grown here through everything that has happened to Enschede since 1930: the war, the slow closing of the textile mills that paid for this city, and the rebuilding of a town that had to find something else to be. The ground around it is a national monument in its own right, protected in part for the park trees along these paths, though that listing praises them as a group and does not name this oak. The tree register does, and it is the only source that does, so read the dating as the register's judgement rather than as a count anybody has taken from the wood.