What is the oldest tree in Groningen?
Groningen's oldest tree is a Common Lime at De Rollen, a moated farm on the city's northeastern edge, planted in 1684 and now roughly 340 years old. The Dutch national heritage register calls it plainly the oldest tree in the province, older than anything in the city's own celebrated parks by more than a century.
Groningen's age claims split cleanly into documented and inferred. The Common Lime at De Rollen carries an actual date, 1684, recorded in the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed's own listing for the farm and repeated in the municipality's 2018 monumental tree policy, which is why it anchors this page as the oldest tree in the city despite standing on private farmland rather than in a park built for visitors. Sterrebos's surviving oaks come close on a technicality: when a storm toppled one of their number in January 2024, a ring count revealed a germination year of around 1758, nearly 130 years earlier than the previous estimate, and heritage officials now assume its still-standing neighbours share that birth year, though none of the survivors have themselves been individually dated. The rest of the list is honestly younger and more provisional: Noorderplantsoen's ginkgo rests on a single municipal source, and Groenestein's plane tree is inferred from the size of its trunk and the age of the estate around it rather than any planting record. None of that uncertainty is unusual for trees planted before anyone thought to write the date down.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.