The Peace Oak of Vroonstalledries

Wondelgem planted this oak in 1920 and put it between the church and the stone that lists its dead. Flanders' heritage inventory files it as a vredesboom, a peace tree, standing on the Vroonstalledries beside the war memorial, two years after the armistice and while the village was still counting what the First World War had taken from it. A dries is a village green, common ground a parish kept undivided, and this one still reads as one: hedge-enclosed, open on all sides, with the seventeenth-century Sint-Catharina church and its churchyard along one edge. Against that hedge stand the stations of a pilgrimage route, put up in 1915 while the war was still running, five years before anybody here planted anything for peace. The tree is a northern red oak, an American species Europe had been planting for well over a century by then. It grows fast and it colours, which is the one promise this entry can make on a fixed date: late October takes the whole crown to scarlet and then rust, and it holds for a fortnight. At just over a hundred years old this is one of the younger trees on the list, and one of only two here whose age comes from a document rather than an estimate. Wondelgem is a district of Ghent, a few kilometres north of the centre.