The occupying French cut down the trees in Deventer's park across the river, and in 1822 the city planted it again. Most of the oaks, beeches and planes in the Worpplantsoen today are from that replanting, which makes the whole park a piece of restitution you can walk through. It is one of the oldest city parks in the Netherlands. The oldest tree is elsewhere: a lime at Diepenveen said to date from 1614, used as a lookout by Cossacks fighting the French in 1813. Two stand downstream at Zutphen, a tree of heaven and an old harbour poplar.
0 / 12 visitati a Deventer
1
De Kozakkenlinde
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 325 to 425 years, and the register suggests a planting in 1614 · Diepenveen
There was a holy oak on this spot and when it died they replaced it with a lime.
That is the register's reading, planting in 1614, following the death of the Hijligen eik that had stood here. Sacred trees were real fixtures of the Dutch countryside, marking a boundary, a court, a crossing or a spot where something had happened, and when one died the community's instinct was often to put another tree in its place rather than let the place go unmarked. That instinct is why the road is called what it is and why this tree exists.
The name it carries now comes from two centuries later. In 1813, during the French occupation of Deventer, the lime is said to have served as a lookout tree for Cossacks fighting against the French. Russian irregular cavalry had followed Napoleon's retreat west across Europe and reached the Netherlands that winter, and a big lime on a rise with a view is exactly what a scout wants.
Both stories are tradition rather than record. The tree is not: it is an enormous old lime on a country road, standing where somebody in 1614 decided a tree should stand.
Go in July, when it flowers and hums.
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2
De Reus van De Worp
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · roughly 115 to 125 years, supported by a 1917 photograph showing it still small · De Worp
The giant of De Worp is called that because of its size, and its size is what nearly got its age wrong.
A poplar this big looks old. The register says it is not especially, and it makes the argument with a photograph. An image of the Lange Laan in the Ossenwaarde taken in 1917 shows this tree standing small and distant, clearly a young and relatively slight thing. That rules out the older datings the girth would suggest and supports a planting somewhere between 1900 and 1910.
Which means a bit over a century has produced a tree people call a giant. That is what Canadian poplar does. It is a hybrid grown for speed, capable of several feet a year on wet ground, and this ground is as wet as it gets: the floodplain of the IJssel, flooded regularly, deep silt, and a water table close to the surface.
The trade-off is that poplars go brittle and are usually removed before they reach this stage.
Stand at the base and look up, then remember that everybody who ever posed under it in a photograph is gone and the tree is younger than most of them were.
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3
The Black Walnut of the Worpplantsoen
Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) · roughly 205 years, from a replanting the register dates to 1820 to 1822 · De Worp
This tree exists because of ice.
The park across the river was replanted in 1816 and the young trees were damaged by ijsgang, the drifting ice that comes down the IJssel when a frozen river breaks up and shoves plates of ice over the banks. It is a serious force and it does not care about a six-year-old sapling. So the planting was done again in 1820 to 1822, and the register dates this walnut to that second attempt.
Black walnut is North American and was an unusual choice for a Dutch public park, then and now. It is grown mostly for its timber, which is among the most valuable in the world, and a two-hundred-year-old one standing in a park rather than a sawmill is a piece of luck.
It is easy to identify once you know where to look. Large compound leaves with fifteen or more leaflets, coming into leaf very late and dropping early. In autumn it produces heavy green fruit the size of tennis balls that fall hard and stain everything they touch a deep brown.
September, then, and mind your head.
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4
The Oak by the Bandstand
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 205 years, from the park's documented replanting of 1822 · De Worp
The French cut down the trees here and the city planted them again.
The Worpplantsoen lies in the floodplain of the IJssel directly opposite Deventer, and it is one of the oldest city parks in the Netherlands. During the French occupation the existing stock was destroyed, which was not vandalism but supply: an occupying garrison needs fuel and timber and a park across the river is the easiest source there is. In 1822, with the French gone, Deventer replanted, and a large share of the oaks, beeches and planes standing there now are from that year.
So the park is roughly the age of the peace that followed Napoleon, and it was made as a deliberate act of repair.
This oak is one of them, just north of the bandstand. At around two centuries it is at half its likely life, and the trees around it are its exact contemporaries, which is unusual: most parks are a mixture of ages, and this one has a cohort.
Come across on the foot ferry rather than driving round. It is the correct approach, the town behind you and the trees ahead.
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5
The Copper Beech at the Bandstand
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 205 years, from the park's documented replanting of 1822 · De Worp
A copper beech planted in 1822 was an early one, and in a public park it was very early indeed.
The purple form of the common beech was still a rarity at that date. It occurs naturally as an occasional mutation and had been propagated by grafting in European nurseries for perhaps sixty years, mostly for private estates and botanic collections. Putting one at the centre of a municipal park in the IJssel floodplain, in a replanting made to repair the damage of an occupation, was a choice with some ambition in it.
It sits centrally, near the bandstand, which is exactly where a designer would place the darkest tree available: the focal point of the composition, seen from every path.
Two hundred years on it is doing the job at a scale nobody planned. A mature copper beech is a solid dark mass, and this one anchors the middle of a park that is otherwise green, open and flat.
The last week of October, when the purple burns through to copper and the whole park briefly reorganises itself around it. Failing that, April, for the translucent red of the new leaves.
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6
The Weeping Beech of the Diepenveenseweg Cemetery
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · roughly 185 to 195 years, from the register's planting band of 1830 to 1840 · Diepenveenseweg
A weeping beech in a nineteenth century cemetery is not a coincidence, it is a convention.
The form was fashionable exactly when these grounds were laid out, and the reading was obvious enough that nobody had to explain it: a tree whose branches fall to the ground rather than reaching up. Cemeteries across northern Europe filled with weeping beeches, weeping willows and weeping ashes in the same few decades, and this one, banded 1830 to 1840, is from the beginning of that.
The register calls this burial ground historically and ecologically very valuable, in the old ring of the city, and it is looked after by a foundation for Deventer's old cemeteries.
What makes the tree worth the walk is that a mature weeping beech is hollow. The branches arch out and hang to the grass all round, so you can push through the skirt and stand inside a green room with a trunk in the middle. Doing that in a cemetery feels like trespass and is not.
One to see in leaf, so any time from May to October. In winter it is a bare cage, which is its own thing but less startling.
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7
The Oak of Landgoed Frieswijk
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 205 to 215 years, from the register's planting band of 1810 to 1820 · Schalkhaar
The register is honest about this one in a way that is worth quoting: the planting history is not known, and the oak was probably put in during the first half of the nineteenth century.
That is the ordinary state of most old trees. No document, no planting record, nobody who wrote it down, and a dating arrived at by looking at the tree and at what was happening on the estate around it. It is worth seeing that stated plainly, because the confident specific ages attached to famous trees usually rest on no more than this and simply do not admit it.
What can be said is that Frieswijk is an estate northeast of Deventer, that the oak stands about 125 metres south of the Raalterweg, and that a pedunculate oak of two centuries in this country is at roughly half its span.
Oak on this ground is the default rather than the exception, which is part of why it goes unrecorded. Somebody planted it because you planted oak, and then two hundred years passed.
It is a walk out of town and the best reason to go is the walk. Come in October for the acorns.
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8
The Steenenkamer Maple
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · roughly 140 years · Steenenkamer, on the IJssel floodplain near the Bolwerksmolen windmill, about 0.6km from Deventer's published dev_005 tree
One of the thickest maples in the Netherlands has two trunks instead of one. It stands on the Bolwerksweg outside Deventer, past the Bolwerksmolen windmill, where the lane runs out onto the floodplain of the IJssel, and it divides low into a double stem carrying a crown far wider than the road it shades. The national tree foundation lists it among the ten most remarkable trees in the province of Overijssel.
It went into the ground somewhere between 1880 and 1890, which puts it at roughly 140 years, young for a tree on a list like this. Almost all of that life has been spent on ground the river takes back whenever the water comes up, which is not where you would expect to find a maple of this size. Deventer's own tree society had the crown pruned back not long ago, the sort of attention a tree gets once a town has decided to keep it.
It grows in a private garden. Its own record says it is clearly visible from the Bolwerksweg, and the roadside is where you stand: there is no way onto the land and no need for one.
Nobody has published a girth for it, so how thick it actually is remains an open question. If you go out there with a tape measure, tell us the number.
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9
The White Willow of Wilp
White Willow (Salix alba) · roughly 130 years · Wilp (Voorst), on the IJssel foreland near the A1 viaduct
Seven metres round, and not yet 140 years old. White willows grow at a rate oaks would find vulgar. This one went in somewhere between 1890 and 1900 on the river ridge of the IJssel foreland at Wilp, and a regional river-heritage survey measures it at about seven metres of circumference, still adding roughly ten centimetres a year. The trunk is hollow and the tree is vital, which for an old willow is normal rather than a contradiction.
Nobody pollarded it for decades, which is why it carries one enormous twisted stem instead of the neat cropped head of a working dike willow. A lightning strike in the 1990s took part of that stem and left it leaning, and the lean has stayed. Its neighbour, a three-stemmed willow of about the same age, was badly burned in the autumn of 2020 and is still standing as well.
Most people meet this tree from the A1 bridge, at speed, on the way into Deventer. The better version is the Bolwerksweg on foot or by bike, roughly two kilometres along the same road from the Steenenkamer maple. Several old willows stand at this spot and we have not pinned the exact one to the metre, so look for the seven-metre waist and the lean. You will know it when you are in front of it.
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10
The Fallen Trumpet Tree of De Lathmer
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · roughly 150 years · Wilp, gemeente Voorst
Most catalpas stand up. This one lies down.
The trumpet tree in the park of De Lathmer has gone horizontal with age, and rather than take a saw to it, the estate left it lying across the grass. What you walk up to is not a trunk with a crown on top of it but a low tangle of limbs at about the height of a person, leaning away in several directions, still in leaf and still flowering every summer.
It was planted somewhere between 1850 and 1880, which makes it roughly 150 years old, give or take a decade. Catalpa bignonioides comes from the American southeast and behaves in a Dutch park like a guest who oversleeps: bare well into May when everything around it has leafed out, then white trumpets by the hundred in high summer, flecked yellow and purple in the throat, then long thin seed pods that hang on and rattle through the winter.
The address changed around it. De Lathmer was a castle estate; the 42 hectares now belong to a care organisation, the house is closed to visitors and the park is not, so walkers reach the tree freely, and the whole complex has been a listed rijksmonument since 2002. Nobody has recorded a girth. On a tree lying at this angle, measuring one would be its own afternoon's work.
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11
The Tree of Heaven of Lunetteplein
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) · roughly 135 to 145 years · Zutphen
Almost every tree of heaven in Europe today is a volunteer nobody planted. This one was chosen.
Ailanthus altissima came out of China in the middle of the eighteenth century as a fashionable garden exotic, and it was still being planted for ornament when this one went in between 1880 and 1890. Then it turned out to do things the nurseries had not advertised. It grows a metre or more a year, seeds by the thousand, throws suckers from any severed root, and loads the soil around it with a compound that holds other species back. It is now one of the most aggressively invasive trees on the continent, at home in railway sidings, demolition plots and cracks in walls.
So a deliberately planted specimen of about 140 years, standing on a public square in a Hanseatic town, is an odd survivor: ornamental planting from the years before anyone knew what the species would become.
The register knows nothing else about it. Species, owner, planting decade, and then the history field reads unknown. If you know how this tree came to be on the Lunetteplein, tell us and it goes on the page.
It stands in the open, a quarter of an hour on foot from Zutphen station.
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12
The Marshaven Poplar
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · roughly 115 to 125 years · Zutphen, harbour district
A Canadian poplar is a crop. The hybrid went into Dutch ground by the million for matchwood, clogs and pulp, and the usual arrangement is that it comes down at thirty or forty years, before the timber loses value and the limbs start letting go. This one was planted around 1900 to 1910 and nobody has taken it out.
It stands on the peninsula at the Marshaven, where the harbour meets the IJssel. The national register looks at that position and wonders aloud whether Rijkswaterstaat, the state water authority, put it there on purpose as a marker for the harbour mouth. No document says so. It is a reasonable guess about a plausible tree in a plausible place, and it stays a guess.
The years do show. On 18 January 2018 a large limb came away, which is what a poplar of this age does; the register noted it and did not treat it as the beginning of the end. The tree is still standing.
What you get is more than a century of a species almost nobody lets grow old, on open ground beside a working river harbour with the barge traffic going by. And on a windy day the leaves do what poplar leaves do, which is most of the reason to stand under one.
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