What is the oldest tree in Hoorn?
Hoorn's oldest documented trees are a run of three, a copper beech, a London plane and a silver maple in the Oosterplantsoen, all dated by the national monumental tree register to between 1860 and 1870, roughly 160 years old.
Every tree on this page comes from a single source, the Dutch national monumental tree register, which gives most of them only a ten year planting band rather than a precise year; the sole exception is the horse chestnut opposite house 37, dated to an actual recorded year, 1901, rather than a range. All eight stand within a few hundred metres of the Oosterpoort, the town's one surviving medieval gate, on ground that was working fortification until the nineteenth century emptied the walls out and turned the space into the public walking park you can visit today. One tree, a plane recorded near house 37, is entered only as a plane: the register gives no species, and neither the London plane nor its own parent, the oriental plane, can be ruled out from anything we have been able to find, so this page asks a visitor who can read the leaf shape to settle it and tell us which one it actually is.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.