The Kleverlaan Yew

Haarlem's oldest general cemetery is also one of the best places in the city to see what a 19th-century idea of a peaceful afterlife looked like in tree form. Zocher, the same landscape architecture family responsible for much of Haarlem's parkland, laid out Begraafplaats Kleverlaan in 1828 on the site of a former farm, choosing the English landscape style over the rigid formal rows more typical of cemetery design at the time: winding paths, ponds, gentle slopes, and specimen trees planted for their individual character rather than uniform rows of identical species. An old yew stands among the results, a species chosen deliberately and repeatedly across European cemeteries for centuries because of its association with mourning and, less morbidly, because yews simply live longer than almost anything else planted beside them, capable in the right conditions of outlasting the cemetery itself. Alongside it grow water and swamp cypresses, an Atlas cedar and a ginkgo, part of the same original planting scheme, though no source gives the yew's precise age beyond describing it as genuinely old rather than merely mature. The cemetery remains open to visitors during normal hours, free of charge, a working burial ground that also functions, almost incidentally, as one of Haarlem's better tree collections.