The Oak of Wijngaardtuin

The Wijngaardtuin, the vineyard garden, takes its name from a monastery vineyard planted here in the sixteenth century, land that stayed under religious cultivation for generations before the city took it over as public parkland. At the end of the nineteenth century the garden was redesigned, probably by L.P. Zocher, of the same landscape architecture dynasty that reshaped Haarlemmerhout and laid out Kenaupark within a few decades of the same commission. This pedunculate oak dates from that redesign, planted somewhere around 1870 to 1880. It stands near a statue called Ontmoeting, Meeting, one of the more recent additions to a garden whose actual history runs back roughly five centuries to vines rather than oaks. A short walk away, in the neighbouring Prinsenhof, a weeping beech from the same general period grows on ground with an even older monastic pedigree; together the two gardens form a small, walkable stretch of what used to be entirely religious land, given over to public use only after the buildings that once justified the walls came down. The oak grows in the open, free to walk up to at any time, no different from any other city park tree except for what the ground beneath it used to grow instead.