Den Bosch grew most of its oldest trees on top of its own dismantled defences, but its actual oldest tree stands somewhere else entirely. A 19th-century law stripped the city's fortress walls of military status, and the bastions became parks almost overnight, feeding three of the city's four clusters. The fourth is a lime tree in Rosmalen, roughly 250 years old, growing on the mound of a convent burned down in 1584. Twelve verified entries in all, from a cherry rooted in the medieval wall to that lime on its vanished convent.
0 / 12 visitados en Den Bosch
Foto: FaceMePLS (CC BY 2.0)
1
The Weichselboom of Parklaan
St Lucie Cherry (Prunus mahaleb) · roughly 100 years · Binnenstad
The St Lucie Cherry growing against Den Bosch's old city wall on Parklaan is a species most Dutch gardeners have never planted on purpose. Prunus mahaleb is usually grown as rootstock for other cherries, not as a specimen tree in its own right, which is part of why this one, roughly a century old and large enough to be nominated for the Dutch national Bomen Top 50 in 2022, stands out on the municipality's own monumental-tree register. Its Dutch name, Weichselboom, comes from the Weichsel river region further east, where the species is more commonly used for the sour Morello-style cherries that give it its alternative name. Rooted directly against the medieval city wall, the tree has spent its whole life with one side of its root system pressed into centuries-old masonry rather than open soil, a growing condition few trees this size are ever asked to tolerate. The wall itself predates the tree by roughly four centuries, part of the fortifications that once ringed the entire old town before most of it was leveled to regulation height after 1874. Parklaan today is a quiet residential street, and the tree is visible from the pavement without needing to enter anyone's garden.
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2
The Norway Maple of Bastion Oranje
Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) · roughly 120 years · Binnenstad
This Norway maple grows on top of two-metre-thick fortress walls built in 1634, the year the Dutch States Army needed a new bastion to close a gap in Den Bosch's defences after capturing the city five years earlier. A windmill stood on the bastion for most of its working life; when it came down between 1880 and 1890, landscape architect J.M. Marechal was already laying out the site as one of several former bastions turned into public parks, following the 1874 law that stripped the city's walls of their military status. The municipal tree register puts this maple at roughly 120 years old, the oldest individually measured tree on the bastion today, with a girth over four metres. A second, slightly younger Norway maple grows nearby on the same earthwork, which is likely why older records disagree about which species belongs to which tree here. What both maples share is the ground under them: the earthen rampart that once absorbed cannon fire now just needs mowing, and the Bastionder, an underground exhibition on the city's fortifications, sits below the park the trees grow in.
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3
The Plane, Lime and Silver Maple of Bastion Vught
London Plane, Large-leaved Lime and Silver Maple (Platanus x hispanica, Tilia platyphyllos, Acer saccharinum) · roughly 100 years · Binnenstad
Three monumental trees, a plane, a lime and a silver maple, stand within forty metres of each other at Bastion Vught, one of only three bastions to survive from Den Bosch's ring of 17th-century fortifications largely intact. Dutch States Army troops breached this exact stretch of wall during the 1629 siege that ended Spanish control of the city, and the site kept its military role for another two and a half centuries before the 1874 law that downgraded fortifications nationwide reduced the walls and freed the ground for parkland, the same shift that turned Bastion Oranje into a park across town. The three trees now anchor that park. The plane is the largest by trunk girth at just over four metres, the lime is the tallest-claiming of the three by canopy spread, and the silver maple, a species chosen for fast growth rather than longevity, has still reached a comparable size in the same roughly one hundred years. All three are sourced to the municipality's own monumental-tree register rather than a second independent account, honestly flagged here, though the register's coordinates place them precisely on the bastion itself.
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4
The Poplar of Zuiderpark
Balsam Poplar (Populus balsamifera) · roughly 90 years · Zuid
At 33 metres, the balsam poplar in Zuiderpark is one of the tallest individually recorded trees in the municipal register covering all of Den Bosch, taller than most of the city's church spires. It predates the park around it by decades: Zuiderpark itself only opened in 1958, and gained a deliberately planted circle of ornamental poplars during a 1993-1999 redesign, but this specific tree, at roughly 90 years old on the register's own count, was already growing here before either the park or its poplar circle existed, a survivor from whatever stood on the site before, rather than a member of the later planting. Balsam poplar is grown more for its resin-scented spring buds than for ornament, the smell carrying across a park on a warm day before anyone spots the tree responsible. No second source beyond the register documents this specific poplar's history, an honest gap rather than a missing footnote, but its height and girth are themselves a verifiable record, not a claim resting on memory or estimate.
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5
The Plane of Sint Janskerkhof
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 170 years · Binnenstad
Six metres and twelve centimetres around the trunk, and no other tree on this page comes within a metre of it. The plane grows on a square that spent most of its history as a graveyard. Sint Janskerkhof is exactly what the name says, the churchyard of the Sint-Jan cathedral, and the dead of Den Bosch were buried here until the ground was cleared from 1860 onward. The municipal register puts this London plane at roughly 170 years, which places its planting within a decade or so of that clearance: the burials stopped, the square was laid out, and somebody put a plane at the corner with Choorstraat. Since then it has watched the cathedral beside it spend more of its life under scaffolding than not, restoration on the Sint-Jan having run in campaigns from the 19th century to the present. The register grades its vitality as reduced, the middle category rather than the worst, so it is holding rather than thriving. One caution about the evidence: the register is the only source that names this individual tree. A 1996 survey of the city's oldest trees names planes among the species that make this quarter old without picking out this one. The Casinotuin trees are a few minutes' walk south.
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6
The Copper Beech of Casinotuin
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Atropunicea') · not documented · Binnenstad
The city register gives this beech an age of zero. That is a blank field rather than a fact, because the trunk measures 4.33 metres round and the crown stands 24 metres up, which no seedling manages. Nobody has dated it, so this page does not either. What has been measured is size, and by that measure it is the thickest tree the register records in the Casinotuin. Copper beech is a purple-leaved form of the common beech, propagated from chance mutations found in the wild and planted through the 19th century for exactly the effect it still has, a mass of dark red over a park where everything else is green. This one grows on the old inner-city water in a garden that a 1996 survey of Den Bosch's oldest trees singled out for its beeches, along with the ramparts across town. A smaller weeping beech stands about 13 metres off, drooping like a closed umbrella, and the two are impossible to mix up once you have seen them side by side. Vitality here reads as normal, the best grade the register awards, which for a tree with no recorded age is the more useful number anyway. What it does not tell you is when somebody planted it, and on current evidence nobody knows.
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7
The Horse Chestnut of Casinotuin
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 100 years · Binnenstad
Five horse chestnuts stand within sixty metres of each other along this stretch of the Casinotuin, and this is the thickest by a clear margin: four metres round against roughly three and a half for the next in line. That is the field mark and also its limit. With five similar trees in one short walk, expect to compare trunks rather than to spot it from the path. The group is a survivor set rather than a fixed avenue, because the park has already lost one of its monumental chestnuts, which went over at the Nachtegaalslaantje corner. The register puts this one at about a century and 24 metres tall, with vitality marked as reduced. That is common in older Dutch horse chestnuts: the species has spent two decades under bleeding canker and leaf miner, and one that reaches four metres round with neither finishing it off has done well. No source other than the municipal register names this individual tree, which is why it is flagged here rather than presented as documented. For a fortnight in May the whole group flowers at once, white candles standing upright over every crown, and the question of which trunk is thickest stops mattering entirely.
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8
The Plane of Hekellaan
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 120 to 150 years · Binnenstad
Boom en Bosch, the local tree-protection group, calls this the largest and perhaps the most beautiful plane tree in the city. They are right about the second half and out by a few hundred metres on the first, because a thicker plane stands at Sint Janskerkhof and the register's tape says so. The two sources also disagree about its age. Boom en Bosch estimates around 150 years, the municipality records 120, neither has a ring count behind it, so the entry here carries the whole range instead of picking a winner. What nobody disputes is the trunk: 4.8 metres round, at the park entrance on Hekellaan along the southern edge of the old fortifications. Plane was the standard 19th-century choice for exactly this position, tolerant of compacted soil, city air and roots being dug through, which is why Dutch park gates are full of them and why the oldest ones tend to stand where a bastion was flattened. The register grades its vitality as normal, the best it gives. It is the only plane at this entrance and unmistakably the heaviest trunk here; the nearest tree of comparable bulk is a horse chestnut some forty metres off, a different species with a different bark entirely.
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9
The Silver Maple by the Oude Dieze
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · roughly 110 years · Binnenstad
Silver maple is a nursery tree, planted for speed rather than for length of life. It grows fast, splits at the fork in a storm and is usually gone before it turns a hundred. This one is on the municipal monument list at roughly 110 years, 25 metres tall, with a trunk close to four metres round, standing along the Oude Dieze where the old inner-city water runs through the Casinotuin. The species comes from the river bottoms of the eastern United States, and a canal bank in Den Bosch is about as close as a Dutch park gets to that. The leaves give it away: deeply cut, pale and nearly white underneath, so the whole crown turns over silver whenever a wind comes up the water. No other maple of its species grows within sight, so there is nothing here to confuse it with; the purple-leaved copper beech about 40 metres away across the same stretch of park is a different tree altogether. Vitality reads as reduced, and the register is the only source that names this individual tree, the 1996 survey of the city's old trees having named maples in this quarter without identifying which. Bastion Oranje and its pair of Norway maples are about six minutes west.
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10
The Oak of Pettelaarse Schans
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 120 years · Zuid
The earthwork under this oak is younger than the oak. Pettelaarse Schans was rebuilt into the star shape visitors walk today in 1959, during the works that made the Zuiderplas lake, and the register puts this pedunculate oak at about 120 years, which means it was planted around 1906 and was already full-grown when the diggers arrived. The site is far older than either. A fort stood here in the 17th century and was demolished in 1672, so the ring of trees on the mound traces a plan that has been dug, flattened and dug again. Then the caveat, because it decides whether you find the right trunk: three oaks stand within about fifty metres of each other up here. This is the thickest at 4.21 metres round, but its neighbour fourteen metres away runs to 3.52 and a third, forty-eight metres off, to 3.92, and telling them apart by eye is genuinely hard. The dependable anchor is the plane tree twelve metres away, a different species with pale flaking bark that nobody mistakes for an oak. Only the register names this individual tree. The fort's history is well documented; this particular oak's is not, and in late September the ground under all three is deep in acorns anyway.
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11
The Poplar of Pettelaarse Schans
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · roughly 85 years · Zuid
If the register's count holds, this poplar was planted around 1941, which puts it in the ground under German occupation and makes it a young tree when the fighting for the city came through in the autumn of 1944. Which planting phase it belongs to has not been written down anywhere we could find, and that stays a gap here rather than getting filled in: the fort was demolished in 1672 and reshaped into its present star in 1959, and this tree predates the second date by nearly twenty years. At 28 metres it is the tallest thing standing on the mound, with a trunk 4.18 metres round. Canadian poplar is a hybrid of the European black poplar and the American cottonwood, bred for timber and shelter belts rather than for parks, which is why it puts on height like this and why one left alone to grow old is rarer than the species' sheer commonness suggests. A second Canadian poplar stands seven metres away and is visibly slimmer, just over three metres round, so the pair separate without a tape measure. The register lists this one's vitality as reduced. The three oaks are a short way west along the same mound, which makes the Schans a walk rather than a single stop.
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Foto: Hans Hagenaars (CC BY 3.0)
12
The Annenborch Lime
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 250 years · A small fenced mound (the site of the former Annenborch convent, burned down 1584) inside the Overlaet housing development, about 5.1km from Den Bosch's published dbo_004
The convent burned down in 1584 and was never rebuilt. What is left of it is a low mound in a housing estate, and a lime tree standing on top of it.
The Annenborch was a house of Augustinian canonesses, founded in 1503 by a knight named Jan Bax, and the fire took it eighty years later. The tree came afterwards, planted on the mound somewhere between 1750 and 1800, which makes it roughly 250 years old and, by local reckoning, the oldest tree inside the boundaries of 's-Hertogenbosch. Local accounts have it surviving the severe storm of 1767, which would put it at the very early end of that planting range or push the range itself back; the two figures sit awkwardly together and nobody has reconciled them.
Since then it has watched the fields around it become the Overlaet district, which built itself around the mound rather than over it. It has been legally protected since the 1970s. Rosmalen knows it as the Annenborchboom and treats it as a local figure: in July 2022 residents of the Annenborch care home, named after the same vanished convent, went out in a convoy of wheelchairs to visit it.
It stands free and open. The fence is there for the roots, not to keep you off.
No girth or height has been published. If you measure it, tell us.
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