The Star Point Oaks of Sterrebos

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.