Groningen's oldest tree keeps company with cows, not city planners: a lime planted in 1684 still stands before a private farmhouse northeast of the centre, decades before Groningen laid out a single public park. Its younger rivals cluster in the Sterrebos, an 18th-century star-shaped forest whose oaks turned out, after a 2024 storm and a ring count, to be far older than anyone had assumed. One of the park's rarest trees, a sessile oak spared from a paving project in 2025, is still fighting for root space today.
0 / 21 visitados en Groningen
1
The Linden of De Rollen
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · about 340 years · Noorddijk
Groningen's oldest tree grows exactly where the national heritage register says it should: in front of the farmhouse at De Rollen, a moated farm complex on the city's northeastern edge, planted in 1684. That makes this Common Lime roughly 340 years old, standing decades before Groningen had a Noorderplantsoen or a Sterrebos to compete with. The Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed's own listing calls it plainly the oldest tree in the province, a claim the municipality's 2018 tree policy document repeats for the city specifically. De Rollen itself dates to the 17th century in its original form, rebuilt as a working farmstead in the first half of the 19th century, moat, gateposts and wooden bridge intact, and the linden predates most of what stands around it today, including the farmhouse's own current front door. Twenty-two more lindens and nine ash trees ring the property's edges, a documented perimeter planting, but none come close to this one's age. The farm still works the land, so the tree is not something to walk up to and touch. It stands in a private dooryard, visible from Noorddijkerweg itself, quietly outlasting three centuries of Groningen's growth from a fortified town into a university city, without ever once needing to move.
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2
The Star Point Oaks of Sterrebos
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 265 years, revised upward in 2024 · Helpman
Storm Henk answered a question nobody had thought to ask properly. When the January 2024 storm toppled one of the old summer oaks planted along Sterrebos's original 18th-century layout, the city's heritage department counted its rings rather than simply clearing the wood, and found a germination year of around 1758, nearly 130 years earlier than the estimate on file. Sterrebos itself was laid out in 1765 by city gardener Jan Godfried Becker as a literal star, eight paths radiating from one central point through a plantation of oaks; this tree had evidently been planted a few years before the park's official founding date, likely an existing woodlot the design was built around rather than a fresh planting. The surviving oaks nearest the fallen one, still standing along the same southern boundary line, are now assumed to share its birth year rather than the younger estimate used before. That correction matters beyond bookkeeping: it means Groningen's civic parks are not simply Victorian additions to a medieval city, they carry at least one working generation of trees from the mid-18th century, quietly older than the park built to showcase them. Storm Henk's felled oak is gone. Its neighbours, grown from the same original planting, are not, and nobody had properly counted their age until one of them fell.
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3
The Winter Oak of Zuiderplantsoen
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · not documented · Helpman
In the summer of 2025, a paving contractor's permit nearly ended this tree's life over a wheelchair-accessible path. The winter oak growing beside a footpath in Groningen's Zuiderplantsoen, part of the old Sterrebos, is a genuine rarity: over 95 percent of the Netherlands' native oaks are summer oaks, and this is one of the remaining few sessile, or winter, oaks, distinguishable by its straighter trunk and stalkless acorns. When the municipality applied to fell eight trees to widen accessibility through the reopened park, the campaign group Bomenridders objected specifically to this one, arguing a narrower path could save it. Seven of the eight felling permits were refused outright; the eighth, for this oak, went unused after the breeding season closed the window, and the alderman announced in June 2025 that accessibility around it was good enough without cutting it down. The story has not stayed tidy since. By April 2026, residents were counting roughly nine dead branches on the tree, still bare while everything around it leafed out, and blaming the thick paving laid close to its trunk for choking its roots and shedding rainwater away instead of into the soil. The tree survived the saw. Whether it survives the path built to spare it is still being decided, one growing season at a time.
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4
The Duck's Foot Tree of Noorderplantsoen
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · more than 140 years · Binnenstad-Noord
The oldest tree in Noorderplantsoen is not a native Dutch species at all. Somewhere along the park's paths grows a ginkgo more than 140 years old, planted not long after the park itself was laid out over Groningen's demolished 17th-century fortifications, following an 1874 law that finally let the city expand past its old walls. Locals call it the eendenpootboom, the duck's foot tree, for the shape of its fan-like leaves, and the nickname is more accurate botany than most: ginkgo is the last surviving member of an entire plant family that predates most of the trees around it by tens of millions of years, a genuine living fossil rather than a figure of speech. In several Asian countries the species carries religious weight, planted at temples and eaten for its seeds, though the seeds are mildly toxic and best left alone here. Noorderplantsoen itself holds more than fifty labelled tree species along a marked route, the kind of park where a stroller with fifteen minutes to spare can read the name of nearly everything overhead, and this ginkgo is the one specimen old enough to have watched the entire park grow up around it, fortress moat turned ornamental pond and all.
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5
The Groenestein Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented, likely 19th century · Helpman
South of a 19th-century country villa in Groningen's smallest urban forest grows the tree that gives Park Groenestein its scale: a plane tree large enough to anchor an entire estate's landscaping around it. The villa itself, called Groenestein, was rebuilt in 1871 over the footprint of a 1685 house, in the sober, understated style favoured by the Groningen merchant families who commissioned these southern estates, and the park around it took its current form in the same period. No source records exactly when this particular plane was planted, only that its size points toward the same 19th-century landscaping campaign that shaped the rest of the grounds, putting it somewhere around a century and a half old rather than a documented number. The municipality's own 2018 tree inventory lists it among the city's monumental specimens on that basis, size and context standing in for a missing planting record. Groenestein, known locally as the owl wood for its resident owls alongside bats, hedgehogs and squirrels, has been a national monument since 1971, but unlike several of Groningen's other historic estates its grounds stay open to anyone who wants to walk them, no appointment and no entry fee, just a short walk along the Helperzoom to a garden that has quietly outgrown the house it was built to flatter.
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6
The Siberian Balsam Poplar of Engelenpoortje
Siberian Balsam Poplar (Populus x berolinensis) · ~90 years · Binnenstad
This poplar is not a species anyone would find growing wild anywhere. Populus x berolinensis was bred in 1865 in Berlin's botanical garden, a deliberate cross between a Siberian laurel-leaf poplar and the tall, narrow Lombardy poplar, made for exactly the trait it shows here, height with a narrow enough crown to survive in a gap between buildings barely wider than the tree itself.
It grows at the Engelenpoortje, a seventeenth-century gated alley named for a long-vanished inn, De Blauwe Engel, that once stood on the corner. The alley has not had a settled recent history: redevelopment around Groningen's Grote Markt closed it to the public in 2012, and it stayed shut for eight years before reopening at the end of 2020. Whether this poplar, which the register dates to the 1930s, stood through that closure without anyone walking past it is not recorded, though a cross this vigorous would have lost little from eight quiet years. It stands today between the shops and houses the alley threads between, free to walk past on the way from Poelestraat to the Nieuwe Markt, exactly as the seventeenth-century gate always intended.
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7
The Oak of Martinikerkhof
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · ~110 years · Binnenstad
For decades in the twentieth century, Groningen parked cars on top of this oak's roots. Martinikerkhof, one of the city's three great squares, spent the years up to the 1970s as a parking lot before the city cleared the cars and let it become what it is today, a quiet, largely car-free green space in the shadow of the Martini Tower. The oak stood through all of it, in the middle of the square, and the municipality's own 2021 survey rates its condition as moderate to poor, noting plainly that the tree appears to be declining in recent years even though the ground around it is now far better than the parking lot it endured for decades. Whatever damage was done may simply have come too late to reverse.
Planted sometime around 1910 to 1920, the oak is old enough to have watched the square through both its worst years and its recovery, and its trunk base is described as intact even as its crown has thinned. It stands in the open, free, at the centre of Martinikerkhof, a short walk from the tower whose bells have marked Groningen's hours for centuries. If its condition improves or worsens, this page should be updated to match; tell us if you have seen it recently.
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Foto: The original uploader was Fruggo at Dutch Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
8
The Chestnut of Prinsentuin
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · ~170 years · Binnenstad
The Prinsentuin has been walled off from the rest of Groningen since 1626, when it was laid out as a private pleasure garden for the region's stadholders, and the wall is still what makes it feel like a secret in the middle of a busy city centre. Visitors reach it through a gate on the Turfsingel topped with a working sundial from 1731, accurate enough to mark day length and sunrise and sunset as well as the hour, or through a smaller door on Kattenhage. Entry is free and has been for as long as records go back.
This horse chestnut, which the tree register dates to around 1850 to 1860, is not part of the garden's original seventeenth-century planting, arriving roughly two centuries after the walls went up, but it has still had well over 150 years inside them. Horse chestnut is not native to the Netherlands, imported from the Balkans as an ornamental tree from the sixteenth century onward, and this one has grown up sheltered from wind and street salt by walls built for a stadholder's roses rather than for any tree. It stands in the open garden, free, daily until sunset, a short walk from Martinikerkhof.
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9
The Chestnut of Akerkhof
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · ~140 years · Binnenstad
When Groningen redeveloped the Akerkhof a few years ago to fix a square that had gone dark, dry and unloved, the plan called for cutting three trees and clearing scrub around the church to let light back in. This horse chestnut was not one of them. The municipality's own account of the project says its monumental chestnut and linden trees deliberately kept their place and gained more room as the work went on, while three new trees were planted along the redesigned Brugstraat to make up for what came down.
Akerkhof was a real cemetery from the twelfth century until burials inside the city walls were banned on hygiene grounds and the ground was cleared in 1828, which is most of why an open square with old trees exists here at all. This chestnut, dated by the register to around 1880 to 1890, is younger than that clearance but has still stood through the square's dark spell and its recent recovery. It grows in the open around the Akerk church, free to walk past any time, on a square the city now treats as worth protecting rather than merely tolerating.
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10
The Maple of Guyotplein
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · ~130 years · Binnenstad
This sycamore grows on a square named for a man most Dutch schoolchildren have never heard of, Henri Daniel Guyot, a Walloon minister who founded the country's first school for deaf children in Groningen in 1790. The square itself started as the planted west side of the Ossenmarkt, given trees in 1754, and only took Guyot's name in 1890, on the centenary of his institute, by which point this specific tree, dated by the register to around 1890 to 1900, was likely just going into the ground.
A monument to Guyot has stood on the square since 1829, decades before it carried his name, and the deaf institute itself operated here for generations before the building later became Groningen's courthouse. The sycamore has outlasted the institute's departure and watched the square's slow shift from an educational address to a judicial one. Sycamore sheds bark in flaking plates as it ages, closer to a plane tree's trunk than to most other maples, worth a look on this one after more than a century of growth. It stands in the open square, free, a short walk from the city's other historic squares.
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11
The Weeping Beech of the Oude Hortus
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica "Pendula") · about 150 years · Hortusbuurt
A glass wall exists in Groningen because of this tree. When the university rebuilt the Muntinggebouw beside the Oude Hortus, the architects set a window into the new facade specifically so this weeping beech would still be visible from Nieuwe Kijk in 't Jatstraat outside, rather than being hidden behind a solid wall the way ordinary landscaping usually loses to construction. The garden's own visitor folder calls it "het pronkjuweel van de Oude Hortus," the showpiece of the Old Hortus, and its cascading, overhanging crown is the reason: Fagus sylvatica "Pendula" grows its branches down and outward rather than up, forming a green curtain rather than a canopy.
The garden's folder dates the planting to 1876; the Dutch national monumental tree register instead gives a broader 1880s band, so treat the age, around a hundred and fifty years, as bracketed between two sources rather than pinned to one. Construction work by the university in 1996 threatened its roots, and the tree was given formal protection at that point, a decision the glass wall later echoed.
The Oude Hortus itself began in 1626 as the university's working botanical garden, moved its living collection to Hortus Haren in 1967, and stayed open afterward as public parkland. Free, roughly twenty minutes from Centraal by foot.
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12
The London Plane of the Oude Hortus
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 150 years · Hortusbuurt
This plane and the weeping beech nearby went into the ground the same year, 1876, on the same patch of former university botanical garden, and one of them has grown into one of the tallest trees in the Oude Hortus. The Dutch national monumental tree register measures it at 29 metres with a trunk just over four metres round, in good health on what the register calls a favourable site, a corner plot beside the garden's newer university building.
London plane is the hybrid workhorse of European city planting, bred from American sycamore and Oriental plane and prized for tolerating compacted soil and polluted air better than almost anything else that grows this large, which is most of why it lines so many European streets and squares. This one, though, grows in a garden rather than along a road, part of a collection that began as a teaching ground for medicinal and useful plants in 1626 under the apothecary Henricus Munting.
The Oude Hortus kept its historic site as public parkland after the university moved its living plant collection to Hortus Haren in 1967, so the garden today is walkable rather than a research facility. Free entry, about twenty minutes on foot from Groningen Centraal.
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13
The Ginkgo of the Oude Hortus
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · about 130 years · Hortusbuurt
Woodpeckers have worked this ginkgo's upper crown for years, and the Dutch national monumental tree register still calls its trunk sound underneath the damage: a three-stemmed specimen planted in 1896 close to the facade of what was then the university's Botanical Laboratory, since replaced by a newer building. The register rates it the thickest ginkgo growing anywhere in the city of Groningen.
Ginkgo biloba is a living fossil in the least metaphorical sense available, the last surviving species of a plant family that predates most of the trees around it by tens of millions of years, easy to spot by fan-shaped leaves unlike any other tree's. This one stands roughly a hundred and thirty years old, planted twenty years after the plane and the weeping beech elsewhere in the same garden, during the Oude Hortus's working life as the university's botanical teaching collection.
The garden itself dates to 1626, founded by the apothecary Henricus Munting, and kept functioning as a research and teaching ground until 1967, when the university's living plant collection moved out to Hortus Haren and left this walled plot as the public garden it remains today. Free, roughly twenty minutes on foot from Centraal station.
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14
The Green Beeches of the Nieuwe Kerkhof
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 150-160 years · Binnenstad-Noord
A parked lawn beside a seventeenth century church holds one of Groningen's largest stands of old beeches, roughly thirty of them by some counts, and the Dutch national monumental tree register singles out two as genuinely exceptional: one standing in front of the Nieuwe Kerk with a long-healed wound in its trunk, the other beside the church carrying an old broken-limb scar that woodpeckers have since hollowed out and that a self-seeded oak has taken root beside.
The Nieuwe Kerk itself, a protected national monument, was completed in 1660, and the register dates these beeches to the 1860s, roughly two centuries younger than the building they stand beside but old enough to have shaded the square through most of its life as a public space. European beech left unclipped and given room, as these two were, grows a dense, smooth-barked canopy that can live for centuries longer still.
Because the register records this pair as one entry rather than two separately pinned trunks, the coordinates here mark the general spot on the church lawn rather than one exact tree; both stand within easy sight of each other. Free, open square, a short walk from the city centre.
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15
The Plane Trees of Noorderplantsoen
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 135-145 years · Noorderplantsoenbuurt
Noorderplantsoen used to be a fortress moat. The park was laid out in 1880 over Groningen's demolished seventeenth century city walls, in the informal English landscape style cities across the Netherlands favoured once their old defences stopped being useful, and it has carried national monument protection since 1971. Along its paths grow more than fifty labelled tree species, among them this pair of London planes, planted close to the park's own opening date and now well past a century old.
The Dutch national monumental tree register records the pair without individual measurements, situating them near Werfstraat on the park's western side. London plane, a hybrid bred in seventeenth century Europe from American sycamore and Oriental plane, tolerates compacted city soil and hard pruning better than almost any other large tree, which is why it anchors so much of Europe's oldest parkland alongside species chosen purely for looks.
Because the register treats this as one paired entry rather than two individually pinned trunks, the coordinates mark the general spot rather than one exact tree; the pair stands close enough together to find both without wandering. Free, public parkland, about a fifteen minute walk from Centraal station.
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16
The Mespilifolia Oak of Noorderplantsoen
Sessile Oak "Mespilifolia" (Quercus petraea "Mespilifolia") · roughly 135-145 years · Noorderplantsoenbuurt
Most oaks in Noorderplantsoen are the ordinary native kind, but this one carries a cultivar name, Mespilifolia, medlar-leaved, for foliage that reads narrower and more textured than a typical sessile oak's. It grows on the park's eastern edge, clearly visible from the residential street the park backs onto, which is exactly why the Dutch national monumental tree register singles it out from the small group it was registered alongside as the specimen worth calling monumental.
Quercus petraea "Mespilifolia" grows a broad, loose crown with branches that droop slightly at the tips, and old specimens like this one develop a shallow-grooved bark distinct from the deeper furrows of a standard sessile oak. The register dates the planting to the 1880s, putting it close in age to the park's own founding in 1880, when the city converted its demolished city-wall moat into the landscaped park that still carries national monument protection today.
One of more than fifty tree species planted along Noorderplantsoen's paths, this oak is the kind of tree a visitor might walk past without a second look from the street side and stop for once they know the cultivar name to look for. Free, public parkland, roughly a fifteen minute walk from Centraal station.
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17
The Plane Tree of Poortershoes
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 180 years · Oosterpoort
This plane is older than the building it fronts. The Poortershoes at Oosterweg 13 went up in 1881 as a school for the children of Groningen's bargemen, but the city's own archive dates the tree in front of it to 1846, thirty five years earlier, which makes it a monument in its own right rather than a landscaping choice that came with the building.
It has had the last laugh since. The school closed long ago and the building is now a neighbourhood community centre for Oosterpoort, while the plane keeps growing against it: the register notes the tree leans slightly from competing with the facade for light, and its roots have started pushing against the wall hard enough to crack the masonry. Nobody has cut it back for that.
At roughly 180 years old it is healthy and in good structure by the city's own assessment, standing right on the public street rather than behind any gate, in front of a building that has already outlived one purpose and is well into its second.
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18
The ANWB Linden of Wilhelminakade
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · about 100 years · Oranjebuurt
The organisation this tree was planted for was not yet fifty years old when it got its own tree, whatever the sign says. Groningen planted a line of lindens along the Wilhelminakade in 1928 to honour the ANWB, then still a cyclists' union rather than the roadside-assistance name it later became, and the register calls it the union's fiftieth anniversary. The ANWB itself dates its founding to 1883, which makes 1928 the forty fifth year, not the fiftieth. Nobody has explained the gap, and this page will not invent one.
The tree itself is plainer than its arithmetic problem. It is a common lime on a street corner, healthy apart from one dead branch, its base ringed with dozens of small knobbly regrowth points where the city has repeatedly cut back suckering growth over the better part of a century. That kind of pollarding scar is usually the surest sign of a genuinely old street tree: a young one has not been cut back often enough to show it.
Free to see, on the public corner of Wilhelminakade and Oranjesingel, no gate involved.
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19
The Wedding Lime of Herewegbuurt
Lime (Tilia sp., recorded by the register as "zwarte linde"/black lime) · about 90 years · Herewegbuurt (Oud-Zuid)
This lime was planted for a wedding that took place five hundred kilometres away. On 7 January 1937 Princess Juliana married Prince Bernhard in The Hague, and Dutch municipalities across the country marked the occasion the way they had for royal weddings for a century before smartphones existed: by planting a tree. Groningen put this one on a small playground at the corner of three streets in Herewegbuurt, one black lime among what Wikipedia's own record of the tradition shows were dozens planted the same year in towns from Beekbergen to Bodegraven.
Ninety years on, the city rates its condition as reasonable rather than excellent, and its trunk has thickened by about fifty centimetres of girth over the last twenty years of measurement alone. A bench now circles the base, which is either a sign of respect or the easiest way to stop anyone parking a bike against the trunk.
Free, public and unfenced, sharing a corner with a children's playground. Nobody has pinned down the tree's exact cultivar, so if you know limes, the page could use your eye.
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20
The Pollarded Lindens of the Pepergasthuis
Lime (Tilia sp.), ensemble of 11 pollarded (leivorm) trees · about 190 years · Binnenstad-Zuid
Ten of these eleven lindens are hollow, and they are still standing because somebody bolted them back together in the 1980s. The tie rods and the healed scars of that surgery are still visible on the trunks. The national register dates the planting to a band between 1830 and 1840, which puts the ten originals at around 190 years old; the eleventh is a replacement. That date rests on the register alone, with no second source to corroborate it.
They fill the courtyard of the Pepergasthuis on Peperstraat, an almshouse founded in 1405 and also called the Sint Geertruidsgasthuis. The trees are centuries younger than the institution around them, and they have been cut into shape for their whole lives, trained in leivorm and pollarded back year after year. That is what a 190-year-old linden looks like when it has never been allowed to grow into a full-sized one.
What they have mostly witnessed is the survival of the almshouse itself. In 2019 the complex was lined up for sale to a private investor. After opposition from the city and the residents the sale was called off, the housing corporation kept the 29 dwellings in social rent, and the lindens went on being pruned.
People still live around this courtyard. It is open daily, roughly nine until six, and the right way to see it is quietly.
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21
The Oak of the Hunenborg
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 150 to 200 years (the group); the oldest individual oak behind dolmen D4 appears older · Midlaren, at the Hunenborg dolmens D3 and D4
The tree worth walking to here is the one the register mentions last.
Four oaks stand at the Hunenborg, banded 1870 to 1880, and as a group they are handsome enough. Then the register adds that the special one is a different tree, standing behind hunebed D4, which already appears on old paintings and looks genuinely older than the four. Nobody has given that oak a coordinate of its own, so the pin here marks the site rather than the trunk. Go round behind D4 and look for the heavier tree.
The ground beneath it works on another scale. Hunebed D3 was built between 3400 and 3100 BCE by the people of the Funnel Beaker culture, who dragged glacial boulders into a chamber and covered them with an earth mound. D4 stands beside it, and the pair together are the Hunenborg. Five thousand years against a couple of hundred: the oaks are recent arrivals on this spot, and nothing about the tomb makes them older than they are.
What the oaks do is make the tombs read properly. A hunebed with veteran oaks standing over it looks like what it is, a burial place nobody ploughed out, and this one lies just south of Midlaren, open ground at any hour.
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