Haarlem's oldest trees mostly grow from the same source: fashionable 19th-century Dutch landscape design, and especially one family, the Zochers, who reshaped a demolished fortress line into Kenaupark, redesigned the medieval Haarlemmerhout, and laid out the Kleverlaan cemetery in the English landscape style within a few decades of each other. Older still is a beech carved by an exiled king passing time at his own government estate, and a plane tree thick enough to need several people to encircle it, growing in the garden of the province's own seat of government.
0 / 21 visitati a Haarlem
1
The Lodewijk Napoleon Beech
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · over 230 years · Haarlemmerhout
A lonely, exiled king passed the time by carving his own royal monogram into a beech tree, and two centuries later almost nothing is left to see of it. Lodewijk Napoleon, installed by his brother as the first King of Holland in 1806, spent time at the government estate now known as Paviljoen Welgelegen, a short walk from this stretch of the Haarlemmerhout, and sometime between 1808 and 1810 carved a crowned letter R into the beech's bark, R for Roi, the French word for king. He was not a popular monarch by Dutch standards, remembered mostly for resisting his brother's harsher demands on the Dutch economy before Napoleon deposed him outright in 1810 and annexed the kingdom directly into France. The carving outlasted the reign by two centuries, slowly closing over as the tree's bark grew and healed around the old wound, the way any scar eventually fades on a tree that keeps living. By 2025, arborists inspecting it reported there was virtually nothing left to make out, the crown and the letter both swallowed by growth. The beech stands in the Haarlemmerhout, the oldest public park in the Netherlands, itself burned to nothing during the 1572-73 Spanish siege of Haarlem and replanted from 1584, meaning this specific tree is a second or third generation of forest on ground that has been fought over more than once.
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2
The Provinciehuis Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented, likely 19th century · Centrum
Haarlem's thickest tree grows in the garden of the province's own seat of government, a plane tree with a trunk six metres around, measured at chest height, which takes several adults linking hands to properly encircle. It stands in the grounds of Paviljoen Welgelegen, a country house built for a wealthy Haarlem merchant in the 1780s that later became the government building of the province of Noord-Holland, its garden known as the Griffietuin. No source pins down exactly when the tree was planted, though a plane tree reaching this girth in the Dutch climate typically implies a century and a half or more of steady growth, placing its likely origin somewhere in the 19th century, around the same era the estate itself changed from private pleasure garden to civic seat. Renovation work on the Griffietuin in recent years has deliberately reconnected it with the neighbouring Frederikspark, restoring a stretch of green that visitors can walk through freely even when the government building itself is closed to the public. The building only opens fully for exhibitions, public council sessions, or the national Open Monumentendag, but the garden and its giant plane require no appointment at all, a rare case of the tree being easier to visit than the institution that happens to house it.
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3
The Kleverlaan Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · not documented, described as genuinely old · Kleverpark
Haarlem's oldest general cemetery is also one of the best places in the city to see what a 19th-century idea of a peaceful afterlife looked like in tree form. Zocher, the same landscape architecture family responsible for much of Haarlem's parkland, laid out Begraafplaats Kleverlaan in 1828 on the site of a former farm, choosing the English landscape style over the rigid formal rows more typical of cemetery design at the time: winding paths, ponds, gentle slopes, and specimen trees planted for their individual character rather than uniform rows of identical species. An old yew stands among the results, a species chosen deliberately and repeatedly across European cemeteries for centuries because of its association with mourning and, less morbidly, because yews simply live longer than almost anything else planted beside them, capable in the right conditions of outlasting the cemetery itself. Alongside it grow water and swamp cypresses, an Atlas cedar and a ginkgo, part of the same original planting scheme, though no source gives the yew's precise age beyond describing it as genuinely old rather than merely mature. The cemetery remains open to visitors during normal hours, free of charge, a working burial ground that also functions, almost incidentally, as one of Haarlem's better tree collections.
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4
The Kenaupark Red Beech
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · not documented, likely about 150 years · Kenaupark
This copper beech stands in front of a 19th-century villa with the kind of theatrical, deep purple-red canopy that looks almost too deliberately composed to be real, the sort of tree that would not look out of place backing a formal portrait, if the painters of Haarlem's Golden Age had lived to see Kenaupark built. The park itself dates from 1865, designed by the father-and-son landscape architects Zocher, the same family behind Haarlemmerhout's redesign a century earlier and the Kleverlaan cemetery, laid out on the site of the old city fortifications after Haarlem's walls came down and the ground beneath them needed a new purpose. Kenaupark takes its name from Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer, a Haarlem woman celebrated, with some historical exaggeration, for helping defend the city during the 1572-73 Spanish siege, one of the few Dutch women from that era whose name survived into a public square's naming. The beech itself has no precise recorded planting date, though its size and the park's own founding year point toward roughly a century and a half of growth. It shares the park with monumental planes, a cypress grove, oaks, a walnut and a stand of chestnuts, all part of the same original planting a Haarlem council chose to make graceful rather than merely functional out of a demolished fortress line.
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5
The Weeping Beech of Prinsenhof
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · ~120 years · Centrum
Prinsenhof has been a garden for longer than Haarlem has had a monarchy to name a park after: a monastery garden from before 1477, when the monastery's own graveyard took over the ground, then in 1721 the city's official herb garden, the stadskruidentuin, moved in and stayed. What visitors walk through today is a municipal plantsoen that still keeps a working herb collection alongside a monumental weeping beech planted in the early twentieth century, threading a line from convent medicine to civic parkland that most Dutch cities cannot draw so cleanly on one plot.
Weeping beech is not a wild form but a cultivated one, Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula', its branches trained downward rather than reaching for light, giving it the look of a tree perpetually caught mid-collapse even in full health. The garden sits within a few dozen metres of a chestnut and, a short walk further, an oak in the neighbouring Wijngaardtuin, both from the same run of Haarlem gardens built on old monastic ground. It stands in the open, free, on land that has been under cultivation of one kind or another for well over five centuries even if this particular tree has only seen a small fraction of that.
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6
The Oak of Wijngaardtuin
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · ~150 years · Centrum
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.
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7
The Bald Cypresses of Kenaupark
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · ~130 years · Kenaupark
Six bald cypresses grow together on the lowest, wettest ground in Kenaupark, and that placement is not an accident. Taxodium distichum is one of the few conifers that tolerates standing water, native to swamps across the southeastern United States, and whoever planted this group at the end of the nineteenth century clearly knew the species well enough to put it exactly where an ordinary tree would struggle. Grouping conifers this way was a habit of the Zocher family, the father-and-son landscape architects who designed Kenaupark in 1865 on the site of Haarlem's demolished fortifications, with the villas around the park going up in the years immediately after.
The register lists the six as a single monumental entry rather than six separate trees, treating the grove as the thing worth protecting rather than any one trunk within it, the same logic behind the Kenaupark plane group and copper beech nearby. Bald cypress sheds its needles every autumn despite being a conifer, one of the few in temperate gardens that does, so the low ground it occupies goes from green to rust orange for a few weeks before going bare. It stands in the open park, free, a few steps from the existing Kenaupark copper beech and its neighbouring plane grove.
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8
The Planes of Kenaupark
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · ~160 years · Kenaupark
Three London planes stand together near the start of Kenaupark, planted in the opening years after the Zocher family laid the park out in 1865 over the demolished line of Haarlem's old city fortifications. The villas that now ring the park went up in the years right after, so these planes are older than almost every building that faces them, among the first plantings to go into ground that had been earthworks and moat a few years before.
London plane is itself a hybrid, a cross between the American sycamore and the Oriental plane first bred in seventeenth-century Europe, prized for tolerating exactly the compacted, disturbed soil a newly filled-in fortification would offer. The register treats the three trees as one monumental entry rather than three individual ones, the group rather than any single trunk being the thing judged worth protecting, matching how the park's bald cypress grove a few dozen metres away is registered. They stand in the open on public parkland, free to walk past any day, close enough to Kenaupark's copper beech and lime that a single stop here takes in four of the park's oldest plantings at once.
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9
The Common Lime of Kenaupark
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · ~110 years · Kenaupark
This common lime is the youngest of Kenaupark's protected trees, planted in the early twentieth century, decades after the Zocher family's 1865 design had already matured into the park visitors walk today. Most of Kenaupark's oldest plantings, its plane trees and bald cypress grove, went in during the park's first years; this lime is a later addition to an already-established landscape, close enough to the original design that the register still lists it as part of the same historic planting scheme rather than treating it as a later intrusion.
Common lime is itself a hybrid rather than a distinct wild species, a natural cross between the small-leaved and large-leaved lime that was the default street and park tree across Dutch cities for centuries, valued for tolerating pruning and city conditions better than most trees its size. This one grows within a hundred metres of Kenaupark's copper beech, its plane group and its bald cypresses, on ground that was open fortification earthworks within living memory of the people who first planted here. It stands in the open park, free, a few minutes' walk from Haarlem Centraal station.
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10
The Ginkgo of the Bolwerken
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · ~110 years · De Bolwerken / Statenbolwerk
De Bolwerken is Haarlem's older green ring, laid out from 1828 by JD Zocher when the city's fortifications came down and needed a public use, decades before his son helped design Kenaupark a couple of hundred metres east. Most of the park's planting is contemporary with that 1828 design. This ginkgo is not: the register dates it to the 1910s, arriving on the lawn at the foot of a low rise nearly a century after Zocher laid the paths around it, a later addition to an already-mature landscape rather than part of the original planting.
Ginkgo biloba is one of the oldest tree lineages alive, unrelated to any other living tree family, which is part of why parks of this period liked to add one: a curiosity that had outlived the dinosaurs long before anyone thought to plant it in a Dutch park. Standing alone on open lawn rather than grouped like the beeches and oaks nearby, it has had space and light a crowded planting would not have given it.
It sits between the Noorderbrug and the Kruisweg crossing, a free, open stretch of park about ten minutes from Haarlem Centraal, and a natural extension of a walk that already takes in the Kenaupark cluster a short distance away.
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11
The Oak Pair of Statenbolwerk
Oak (Quercus robur or Quercus petraea; the register does not specify which) · ~170 years · Statenbolwerk
Two oaks flank the start of a footpath on the west side of Statenbolwerk, planted in the 1850s to mark the entrance the way a gate would, a decade or so before the villas that now line the park went up. Haarlem's register keeps them as one entry rather than two, the pairing itself being the point: an oak either side of a path reads as an entrance in a way one oak standing alone never would.
The register does not say which oak. Quercus robur (pedunculate) and Quercus petraea (sessile) both grow in Dutch parks of this age, and neither the register nor anything else found this pass narrows it further, so this page states the pair honestly as oak, species undetermined, until someone with a closer eye at the leaf and acorn tells us which. That gap does nothing to the trees themselves: at around 170 years old they are exactly contemporary with Statenbolwerk's own villas, planted in the same decade the walking park matured from Zocher's original 1828 design into the residential quarter that still surrounds it.
They stand free and open on public parkland, a few minutes from three more Statenbolwerk trees on this page and from Kenaupark's own cluster a few hundred metres further on, part of the same green ring that replaced Haarlem's demolished city walls.
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12
The Caucasian Wingnut of Statenbolwerk
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · ~120 years · Statenbolwerk
This Caucasian wingnut grows in the garden of a private villa at Statenbolwerk 1, and the honest way to see it is from the footpath outside rather than at the trunk: the Dutch national monumental-tree register lists it as visible from public ground even though the ground it stands on is not. Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from forests around the Caucasus and the southern shore of the Caspian, a relative of walnut grown for its long hanging chains of winged seeds rather than for timber, and it took root here in the first decade of the twentieth century, once Statenbolwerk's grand villas had already gone up along the old fortification walk Zocher laid out in 1828.
At around 120 years old it is one of the younger trees on this page, but wingnuts grow fast and wide, and this one has had a private garden's room to do it without a park's usual crowding. What a visitor gets is a view rather than a walk-up: stand on the Statenbolwerk path and the crown shows above the villa's hedge, part of the same short stretch of park that already holds two more of this page's newest trees, the oak pair and the beech ensemble, both properly on public ground a few dozen metres away.
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13
The Beech Ensemble of Statenbolwerk
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · ~170 years · Statenbolwerk
Four beeches grow together along the Statenbolwerk footpath near house number 26, planted in the 1850s as part of the same wave of planting that gave the walking park its villas a decade later. The Dutch monumental-tree register counts the four as a single entry, the row rather than any one trunk being what earned protection, the way Kenaupark's plane and cypress groups are registered a few hundred metres away.
A relative did not survive. A single copper beech about 200 metres from this group, at Statenbolwerk 2, was reportedly around 222 years old when storm Eunice tore it down in February 2022; local coverage of the felling reported its wood was later turned into cutting boards and knives rather than left to rot. This ensemble is a different, ordinary green beech, a different register entry and a different age bracket, but the loss is a reminder that a storm does not check a tree's paperwork before it falls.
The four stand in the open on public parkland, free to walk past at any time, a short stretch from the oak pair, the wingnut and the Kenaupark cluster that make this corner of Haarlem's old fortification ring one of the densest on the whole page.
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14
The Ash of Kleverlaan
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · roughly 140-155 years · Kleverlaan
The general cemetery on the Kleverlaan is where Haarlem keeps its best trees, and this ash is one of the reasons guided tree walks stop here at all. It stands in the oldest section, on the south side, at a bend in the path with graves gathered close around its roots. The national register of monumental trees puts its planting somewhere between 1870 and 1880, so it is roughly 140 to 155 years old, and that band is as precise as the record allows. Ash rarely gets to be the tree people notice. It has no autumn colour worth the name, the bark stays grey and quiet, and the leaves drop early and more or less all at once. What it has instead is height and a light, open crown that lets the grass grow right up to the trunk, and after a century and a half over the same graves this one has plenty of both. The register is the only source that names this particular tree, which is why it is listed here with its dates attributed rather than asserted; the cemetery's beeches, cedar, walnut and yew are far better documented than its ash. If you know when it went in, or who planted it, tell us. It stands about a hundred metres from the Kleverlaan yew, so the two make one stop rather than two.
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15
The American Oak of Kleverlaan
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 115-125 years · Kleverlaan
Come in through the Kleverlaan gate and the first thing you meet is an avenue of wingnuts. This American oak stands one connecting path to the left of it, which is exactly where the register tells you to look. Quercus rubra is not a Dutch tree. It came from the eastern seaboard of North America and Dutch parks and cemeteries planted it widely from the nineteenth century onward, largely for what it does in autumn. Native oaks go brown and hang on to the leaf half the winter. This one goes deep red in late October and lets go. The register dates its planting to between 1900 and 1910, making it roughly 115 to 125 years old, which is young for a monumental tree and respectable for a red oak in a Dutch cemetery. It has stood beside the gate for more than a century of funerals. The cemetery is one of three stops on the Bomenstichting's monumental tree walk through Haarlem, and this oak is one of the reasons the route comes here, though the national register is still the only source that records the tree itself. Take the dates as the register's rather than as a measurement. Its leaves are the easy check: broad, with shallow lobes ending in fine bristle points, and far bigger than anything a native oak produces.
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16
The Black Locust of Kleverlaan
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · roughly 95-105 years · Kleverlaan
This black locust has its feet in a hedge. The register puts it in the first plot on the left as you come through the entrance, along the path, with the base of the trunk standing in clipped greenery, which is an odd berth for a tree of nearly a century. Robinia pseudoacacia arrived in Europe from the Appalachians in the early seventeenth century and carries the name of Jean Robin, gardener to the French kings. It spread across the continent as a street and park tree because it grows fast, tolerates poor thin soil, and smells extraordinary for about two weeks a year. In late May and early June it hangs white pea flowers in chains and the scent carries a long way down a quiet path. The rest of the year it is a scruffier proposition: deeply furrowed bark like twisted rope, a crown that looks half assembled, limbs that snap in storms. The register dates the planting to between 1920 and 1930, so roughly 95 to 105 years, and it is the only record we have found of this particular tree. No second source names it, so read the age as the register's estimate. It stands within a hundred metres of the red oak and the silver lime, which makes all three one short loop just inside the gate.
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17
The Silver Lime of Kleverlaan
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · roughly 175-185 years · Kleverlaan
Dead bumblebees turn up under silver limes every summer, and botanists have argued about why for a century. The old explanation was that the nectar of Tilia tomentosa is mildly toxic to bees. The current one is duller and sadder: the tree flowers when almost nothing else does, so late season bumblebees with nothing left to visit work it until they run out. Either way, this is a tree that draws insects after the rest of the city has finished flowering. It stands in the oldest part of the Kleverlaan cemetery, on a path beside the water. The national register puts its planting between 1840 and 1850, which makes it roughly 175 to 185 years old and one of the oldest things growing on this ground. Turn a leaf over and the underside is white with felt, which is where the name comes from and why the whole crown flickers pale when wind moves through it. It is also why the species survives city dirt so well: the felt sheds it. The register is the only source we have located for this tree. Nobody has published a girth or a measured age, so the band above is the register's estimate rather than anyone's tape. If you have measured it, we would like the number.
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18
The Zocher Beeches
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 175-225 years · Kleverlaan
The two men who laid out this cemetery are buried in it, and three beeches carry their name. Father and son Zocher were the landscape architects of the Kleverlaan grounds, and two cemetery records place their graves on the east side, near Schoterweg. The register lists three European beeches standing together at that spot under a single entry: Zocherbeuk, the Zocher beech. Whether the trees were planted at the graves or the graves placed among beeches already growing is not something any source we could reach states plainly, so we are not going to pretend otherwise. The register gives a planting band of 1800 to 1850, which is roughly 175 to 225 years, a range wide enough to allow either version. What is not in question is what they do to the ground. Mature beech keeps its lowest limbs low and sweeps them out sideways, and three of them together make one dark room with a floor of husks and nothing growing in it. That is the tree working: beech leaves cast the deepest shade of any European broadleaf, and very little survives underneath. In November the crowns go copper together. In February, bare, the grey trunks are the best thing on the path. A figure of four metres round circulates for this group, and we have not been able to confirm it.
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19
The Plane of Frederikspark
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 155-165 years · Frederikspark / Houtplein
Five and a half metres around the trunk and twenty four metres up, on a scrap of green between a busy junction and the Houtplein bus stops. A professional tree care firm measured this plane at 175 centimetres of stem diameter, which is where that girth figure comes from, and the national register dates the planting to between 1860 and 1870, so roughly 155 to 165 years. It was here long before the traffic was. London plane is the tree cities keep when they keep nothing else, and this one shows why. It takes exhaust, compacted soil, hard pruning and root damage and carries on. Rather than trying to breathe through a century of grime it sheds its bark in plates, which is why the trunk is mottled cream, olive and grey instead of uniformly filthy. The species is a hybrid, an accident between the American and the oriental plane that turned up in Europe in the seventeenth century and turned out to be tougher than either parent. Stand under it in winter and the frame reads clearly: a short heavy bole, then limbs going out almost horizontally before they turn up, with bobbled seed balls hanging on long strings until spring. Two independent sources agree on this tree, which makes it the best documented entry in the Frederikspark and the easiest one to find.
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20
The Oak Pair of Frederikspark
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 180-190 years · Frederikspark
Two pedunculate oaks stand together on the west side of the Frederikspark, and on the register's own dating they are the oldest things in it. The planting band is 1840 to 1850, so roughly 180 to 190 years, a couple of decades ahead of the big plane at the Houtplein end. Old oaks are scarce in Dutch cities for an unromantic reason: Quercus robur was the timber tree of the Republic, worth more felled than standing, and anything straight enough went into ships, locks and sluice gates. These two were left alone long enough to stop being timber and start being furniture for a park. A pair planted close grows into a single argument about light. Each crown leans away from the other and the branches on the facing sides stay short, so from a distance the two read as one lopsided tree and only resolve into two when you walk round them. In a good mast year the grass beneath is covered in acorns by October. The national register is the only source we have found for either tree, so the age is its estimate rather than a measured figure, and nobody has published a girth for them. If you get a tape around a trunk here, we would like to hear the number.
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21
The Pin Oak of Frederikspark
Pin Oak (Quercus palustris) · roughly 180-190 years · Frederikspark
Pin oak reached European gardens at the start of the nineteenth century, which means this one, if the register's dating holds, belongs to the first generation planted here. The band is 1840 to 1850, so roughly 180 to 190 years old, and it stands along the path in the middle of the north side of the Frederikspark. Quercus palustris is easy once you have seen one. The lower branches sweep down toward the ground instead of reaching for the light, the leaves are cut into deep narrow lobes with bristle tips, and the crown keeps a tidy conical outline far longer than any native oak manages. Then in late October it turns scarlet and holds the colour for weeks after the limes and the ashes have given up. The name has nothing to do with the leaves. It comes from the short hard pin-like stubs of dead branchlets left along the trunk and the inner limbs, a habit the species has and most oaks do not. The tree is a swamp oak by origin, from the wet bottomlands of the American Midwest, which is one reason it has done so well in a country built on waterlogged ground. The national register is the only source we have found for it, so read the age band as its estimate. No girth has been published.
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