Haarlemmermeer is a municipality built on a lake bed: engineers pumped the Haarlemmermeer dry between 1849 and 1852, and every tree here has grown on ground that did not exist as farmland before that. Its eight registered trees spread across four villages inside the polder, Nieuw-Vennep, Hoofddorp, Vijfhuizen and Badhoevedorp: a chestnut and an ash on a farm road, a maple in a churchyard, a wingnut saved from a shopping centre, a lime planted for a royal jubilee, a plane that predates the street around it.
0 of 8 visited in Haarlemmermeer
1
The Horse Chestnut of the Waterwolf
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 110 years, from a registered planting date around 1920
There is a lake under this tree. Until 1852 the Haarlemmermeer covered everything you can see from here, wide enough to frighten Amsterdam and hungry enough at the edges to have earned the name Waterwolf. Three steam pumping engines emptied it over three years, and the lake floor they laid bare sits roughly four metres below sea level.
That is the ground this horse chestnut is rooted in. The register puts its planting between 1910 and 1920, which makes it about 110 years old, and out here that counts as old: no tree anywhere in the polder can predate the drainage, so the oldest possible tree in the Haarlemmermeer is younger than most of the houses in Haarlem. Aircraft climb out of the same lake bed a few kilometres north.
It stands on the west side of the Hoofdweg, the road that runs the length of the Hoofdvaart, the canal cut dead straight through the middle of the drained lake. This stretch is still farmland, and the tree has the shape a chestnut gets when nothing has ever crowded it: low, wide, branching almost from the ground, the candles in May starting at head height.
Nobody wrote down who planted it. The register's history field for this tree is blank, and it is the only source that describes it at all. If it once belonged to a farm along this road, tell us.
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2
The Surviving Ash of the Hoofdweg
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · roughly 100 years, from a registered planting date around 1930
Most Dutch ash trees of this age are dead or going. Ash dieback reached the Netherlands around 2010, a fungus out of east Asia that the European ash has no answer to, and it has worked through the country's ash population ever since, killing the crown downward from the twigs. A small fraction of trees turn out to be genetically tolerant, and those few matter enormously, because they are the parents of whatever ash the Netherlands still has in fifty years.
This one is still standing on the Hoofdweg. The register puts its planting between 1920 and 1930, which makes it about a century old, on ground that had only been dry land for about seventy years when it went in.
Ash is the tree everything used to be made of: cart shafts, tool handles, ladders, oars, early aircraft frames. It bends a long way before it gives and it gives without splintering, so it went into anything that had to absorb a shock. It is also the last tree in a Dutch hedgerow to come into leaf and among the first to drop, which leaves it bare for more than half the year. Winter is when it is easiest to name from the road: the buds are matt black and shaped like small hooves, and nothing else here has them.
The chestnut a few doors up is the older of the two. The register is the only source for either.
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3
The Maple of the Nieuw-Vennep Church
Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) · roughly 90 years, from a registered planting date around 1940
The sap of a Norway maple is milky white. That one fact separates it from the sycamore it otherwise closely resembles, and it means a broken twig on this tree bleeds like a dandelion stem instead of running clear.
It grows in the grounds of the Hervormde church on the Hoofdweg in Nieuw-Vennep, a village that exists at all because the Haarlemmermeer was pumped dry in 1852 and somebody then had to farm the lake bed. The register puts the maple's planting between 1930 and 1940, so it is about ninety years old, and it has spent every one of those years on ground nobody has ever had a reason to dig up.
Norway maple is the tree that gets the Dutch spring started. It flowers in April, before its own leaves are out, in dense clusters of a sharp yellow-green that read from a hundred metres off and can fool you into thinking the crown has leafed a month early. Bees work them hard, because almost nothing else is open yet. The leaves that follow are broad and thin with long drawn-out points, and by late October they turn clear yellow.
Churchyards are where old trees tend to survive, for the plain reason that nobody redevelops one. Nobody recorded who planted this maple, and the national register is the only source that describes it. If you know, tell us.
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4
The Wingnut of the Hoofddorp Market
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · roughly 90 years, from a registered planting date around 1935
When Hoofddorp built a new shopping centre around its market square, the municipality made saving this tree a condition of the plan. That is on the record as the reason it is still there, planted, the register says, around 1935, in front of what is now the market hall.
Caucasian wingnut is not a tree many Dutch town squares grow. It comes from wet valley floors in the Caucasus and northern Iran, suckers readily from its own roots, and in midsummer it hangs strings of winged nutlets half a metre long from every branch tip, for a few weeks looking like a tree decked out for a parade nobody announced.
Being kept during redevelopment is not the same as being cared for since, and the register does not say anything about its condition today. What it records is a species and a rough decade, and nothing else has been published about this particular tree.
It stands in the middle of Hoofddorp, free to walk up to any day of the week. If you know more about why the council insisted on keeping it, tell us.
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5
The Jubilee Lime of Vijfhuizen
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 115 years, from a registered planting date around 1910
In 1923 the Netherlands marked twenty five years of Queen Wilhelmina on the throne, and this lime went into the ground in Vijfhuizen to mark it, one of many jubilee trees planted across the country that year. The register keeps the reason on file even though almost nothing else about the tree has been written down.
It stands on the Spieringweg opposite a spot known locally as the Fortwachter, in what the register calls a plantsoen: an ordinary municipal planting strip rather than a park. A common lime grown out in the open like this builds a dense, rounded crown down to head height, and in July it does what limes do everywhere: small pale flowers open in hanging clusters, the tree hums with bees for a couple of weeks, and the scent carries across the road.
A century is not old for a lime, which can run to several, but it is old for anything standing in the Haarlemmermeer, ground that was still open water until 1852. The register is the only source that has looked at this specific tree. If you know more about the planting or the jubilee it marked, tell us.
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6
The London Plane of Hoofddorp
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 140 years, from a registered planting date around 1885
Locals use this plane tree to navigate by. The register's whole reasoning for designating it monumental is two words: remarkable form, landmark, and that is the sum of what has been written about it.
It grows on municipal ground in front of a notary's office at the corner of the Hoofdweg and the Manegelaan, planted, the register estimates, somewhere in the 1880s, which would make it Hoofddorp's oldest registered tree by a wide margin over almost everything else on this page. London plane is a hybrid that barely exists in the wild, first bred in seventeenth century Europe by crossing an American and an Oriental species, and it turned out to tolerate compacted soil, pollution and hard pruning better than almost anything else available, which is why it lines so many European streets and squares. Its bark flakes away in patches instead of splitting, so the trunk carries a camouflage pattern of grey, green and cream that keeps changing as old plates drop off.
At around 140 years old it predates the notary's office, the Manegelaan and most of what stands near it now. The register is the only source that has looked at it. If you know when it actually went in, tell us.
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7
The Weeping Beech of the Ring Road
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · roughly 115 years, from a registered planting date around 1910
The register's own 2024 inspection ends on an unusually candid note: the tree, it says, is not doing well these days. That is close to an editorial opinion for a database this dry.
The weeping beech stands with a handful of ordinary beeches on a corner where the Hoofdvaart, the canal cut straight through the drained lake to the old pumping station, meets the ring road that now circles Hoofddorp. The register's own guess is that before the ring road existed, this corner might have been a small park; if so, the road took most of it, and what is left reads as a traffic island with trees on it rather than the parkland setting the tree wants. Planted, the register estimates, between 1900 and 1910, it is around a century old.
A weeping beech is not a natural form. Every one alive descends by graft or cutting from a single tree found wild in Germany around 1680, propagated ever since because its branches fall instead of rising, so a mature specimen makes a tent of foliage with the trunk hidden somewhere inside. Squeezed onto a traffic corner and hemmed in by road, this one has never had the room to do that properly, which may be exactly what the register means.
The register is the only source. If you know this tree, tell us how it is doing now.
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8
The Roadside Maple of Badhoevedorp
Maple (Acer sp.) · roughly 110 years, from a registered planting date around 1915, though the register's own note suggests 1895
This maple stands in the front garden of a house on the Nieuwemeerdijk built in 1915, and the register cannot quite agree with itself about which of the two is older. Its structured record bands the planting to 1910-1920. Its own descriptive note gives 1895 instead, and adds that if that figure is right, the tree was already growing on this dike before the house went up beside it. Both cannot be true, and we have not been able to resolve which the register meant.
The species is recorded no more precisely than maple, Acer species, without a name for which one. If you can put a name to it from a photograph, tell us that too.
None of the uncertainty affects what a passerby can see: a full, healthy crown that the register itself calls the single most striking thing about this stretch of the Nieuwemeerdijk, visible the whole way along the road. The tree grows in the garden of a house that is still lived in, so this is a look rather than a visit. There is no gate to try and no reason to open one, just a wide view from the roadside.
The register is the only source that has looked at this tree, and on its own evidence it has not entirely made up its mind.
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