The Plane of Terworm

Everyone in Heerlen calls this tree the Eik van Terworm, the Oak of Terworm, and it is not an oak. It is a plane, and the name has stuck regardless, attached to a tree the register bands to 1750-1800 and local sources call the oldest in the city at around 280 years. The register's own note gives a specific occasion: probably planted in 1749, to mark the birth of the heir to Terworm, the estate whose grounds still surround the castle a short walk away. An information board at the tree repeats the story. Planting a tree for a birth was ordinary practice on estates like this one, meant to grow alongside the child it marked and to outlast them both, which this one has done by nearly two hundred years already. It stands alone at a junction near the Eikendermolenweg, the kind of solitary position that let it build the wide, low crown a plane develops when nothing crowds it. Locals treat it as a boundary marker between what were once separate estates, though nobody has confirmed that was the original intent rather than a story that grew up around an old tree at a crossroads, the way stories do. Go looking for an oak and you will walk straight past it.