What is the oldest tree in Ghent?
The oldest trees in Ghent are three that share a date: a weeping silver lime, a ginkgo and a common ash, standing within a hundred metres of each other in Muinkpark, south of the historic centre, and all roughly 170 years old. Flanders' heritage inventory records the three as belonging to the first planting of that park, ground the city's natural history society bought in 1851 to build a zoo on, so none of them is older than the others and the lime is simply where this list starts.
Ghent's answer is a trio rather than a single tree, and the reason sits in the register's wording. Flanders' heritage inventory does not date these three individually. It records each as belonging to the first planting generation of Muinkpark, the 3.3 hectares of meadow the Gentse Maatschappij voor Natuurlijke Historie bought in 1851 and turned into zoo grounds, and each as carrying a trunk over three metres round. A generation is not a planting year, which is why the age here is a band of roughly 150 to 185 years rather than a figure. The largest trunk on this list is not among them. The copper beech in the middle of Sint-Annaplein measures 4.26 metres round and has no date at all: the register suggests it may go back to the square's construction in the 1840s, while a separate account of the square records chestnuts planted there in 1869, and neither is talking about this beech specifically. Muinkpark is free, open and small, roughly twenty minutes on foot from Gent-Sint-Pieters station. Start with the weeping lime at the southern end; the ginkgo and the ash are a short walk north of it.
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