The Plane Tree of Klokkenplas

The garden this tree belonged to is gone. The tree is still standing in the middle of where it was. The national register of monumental trees records the plane on the Klokkenplas as a remnant of a garden of the van Heek family, and dates its planting to somewhere between 1860 and 1870. A 2026 survey of the city's historic planes by the local heritage foundation puts the group it belongs to at 140 to 160 years, a little younger and clearly overlapping. Around a century and a half is as tight as the two sources honestly get. That is long enough to have stood through the plot around it turning from private ground into a public square, and through Enschede becoming a textile city and then ceasing to be one. It has company. The same survey counts it among a small set of monumental planes in the centre, alongside the Bomen van Herman on the Noorderhagen and the plane on the Cort van der Lindelaan, which is itself what remains of a country garden the city built over in the 1920s. Three trees, three vanished gardens, an easy walk between them. The heritage foundation called its piece on these planes "if trees could talk". This one would spend most of the conversation on things that are no longer here.