Zwolle pulled down its fortifications and made a ring of parks out of the earth, which is why almost every old tree in the city is standing on a seventeenth century rampart. The best of them is a plane on the Potgietersingel: 33.6 metres tall with a trunk 719 centimetres round, which are measured figures rather than estimates. The oldest is a beech in the grounds of a small country house outside town, where Rhijnvis Feith, poet and mayor of Zwolle, spent his free time writing and in 1799 published an ode to the place in 34 verses.
0 / 16 visitati a Zwolle
1
The Plane of the Potgietersingel
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 175 to 225 years, from the register's planting band of 1800 to 1850 · Potgietersingel
Thirty three point six metres tall, and a trunk seven point one nine metres round. Those are measured numbers, not estimates, which makes this tree the most precisely known thing on this page and one of the largest planes in the Netherlands.
Seven metres of girth means roughly two and a quarter metres of diameter. Four adults with their arms out would not close a circle round it.
It is standing on a defensive earthwork. Zwolle's seventeenth century fortifications were demolished in the nineteenth, as they were in almost every Dutch town, and the earth was reshaped into a ring of singels and parks. So the ground here is made ground, thrown up to stop artillery and then handed to a garden designer, and this plane has had close to two centuries of deep, loose, undisturbed soil that no city street could offer it.
That is most of the explanation for the size. The other part is the species: planes tolerate everything a city can do to them, and given room they simply keep going.
Bark in flaking cream and olive plates, big maple-shaped leaves, and hard bristly seed balls hanging on their stalks all winter.
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2
The Beech of the Boschwijk Avenue
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 225 to 275 years, from the register's planting band of 1750 to 1800 · Boschwijk
In 1799 the mayor of Zwolle published a 34 verse poem about this garden.
Rhijnvis Feith owned Boschwijk, a small country house not far outside the city, and he was one of the best known Dutch poets of his generation as well as a magistrate and mayor. He came out here in his free time specifically to write. 'Ode aan Boschwijk' is the result, and it is about this ground.
The beech is banded 1750 to 1800, which means it was somewhere between a sapling and a young tree while he was writing. It stands on the west side of the beukenloofgang, the beech avenue, which is the feature of the place: two rows planted close so the crowns meet overhead and make a green tunnel.
A beech avenue is a designed effect that takes a century to work and then works forever. It is also a slow-motion contest, because beeches planted that close spend their lives shading each other out, so the ones that survive are the ones that got up fastest.
Go in early May, when the new leaves are still translucent green and the tunnel glows rather than darkens.
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3
The Horse Chestnut of the Park Eekhout
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 165 to 175 years, from the register's planting band of 1850 to 1860 · Eekhout
A horse chestnut that has reached a hundred and seventy years is doing better than most of its kind manage now.
The species has had a bad half century in Europe. Bleeding canker, a bacterial infection that leaves rusty weeping patches on the bark, has killed a large share of mature trees since the 1990s. The horse chestnut leaf miner, a moth whose larvae tunnel between the leaf surfaces, arrived in the Netherlands around 2002 and now browns the foliage of nearly every tree in the country from July onward. The moth does not kill, but a tree that loses its leaves two months early every year for twenty years is a weakened tree.
So an old, big, still standing chestnut is worth registering as the survivor it is.
It stands in the southeast part of the Park Eekhout, on the ring of the old fortifications, banded 1850 to 1860.
Come in the first half of May, before the miner gets going. That is when the tree does the thing it was planted for: hundreds of upright white flower spikes over the whole crown, each one with a yellow throat that turns red once the flower has been pollinated and no longer wants visitors.
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4
The Red Oak of Boschwijk
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Boschwijk
It was planted for one week a year and it delivers.
Red oak is North American, it reached Europe in the seventeenth century, and it was planted across Dutch estates in the nineteenth for a single reason: nothing native here turns that colour. In late October a mature one goes deep scarlet and then rust, and it holds it for a fortnight while the beeches around it are doing their more restrained copper.
The leaves are the easy way to tell it from a native oak. They are much larger, with pointed lobes ending in tiny bristles, where a pedunculate oak has small soft rounded lobes and no bristles anywhere.
This one stands by the drive to number 7 on the west side of Boschwijk, banded 1860 to 1870, so it is a generation younger than the beech in the avenue and belongs to a later phase of planting on the same ground.
The acorns are worth a look too: squat and broad with a shallow saucer of a cup, quite unlike the neat long acorn of a native oak, and they take two years to ripen rather than one.
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5
The Gate Beech of the Park Eekhout
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Eekhout
The register calls these the poortbomen, the gate trees, which is a job description rather than a species.
Planting a pair of matched trees where a path enters a park is one of the oldest moves in the trade. It makes an entrance out of a gap, and it does it without a gate, a wall or a sign. You know you have arrived somewhere because two large trees have agreed to stand opposite each other. On the way out they frame the street.
This beech is one of that pair, banded 1860 to 1870, planted into the park that was made on the city's demolished fortifications.
Beech was the right choice for the role and a slightly cruel one. The species casts denser shade than any other large tree here, so a gate flanked by two of them is genuinely darker than the ground on either side, and stepping through is a change in light as well as in place. That is the effect, and it took a century and a half to mature.
The bark stays smooth and thin all its life, which is why a beech at a park entrance is always the one covered in carved initials.
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6
The Copper Beech by the Fountain
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Van Nahuysplein
A dark tree next to moving water was somebody's decision.
This is a designed pairing and it still works: a copper beech placed to the left of a fountain on a square at the end of the Wilhelminasingel, planted between 1860 and 1870, when the ring of parks on the old fortifications was being finished and the city was arranging its new edges to be looked at.
Purple foliage was a strong colour to have available. Copper beech is a mutation of the common beech, propagated by grafting rather than seed, and in a nineteenth century planting scheme it functioned as the darkest tone on the palette, the thing you put where the composition needed something heavy. Against pale water and spray it does exactly what was intended.
A hundred and sixty years later it is also just a very large tree in the middle of a city, which is worth going to stand under. The canopy on a mature one is dense enough that the ground beneath stays dry in light rain.
In the last week of October it turns from purple to a deep burnt copper and the square changes colour with it.
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7
The Oak of the Kranenburg Cemetery
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Kranenburg
It is in the new section, and it is a century and a half old, which tells you something about the scale a cemetery is planned on.
Burial grounds are the best places in a Dutch city to find big trees, and the reason is mechanical rather than sentimental. The ground is never redeveloped, never dug for services, never paved, never parked on, and nobody is in a hurry. A tree planted at the edge of a cemetery in the 1860s has had the single most stable century and a half available anywhere inside a growing city.
Oaks in particular are a standard choice for the setting, for the obvious reason that they outlast everybody in it several times over. Pedunculate oak routinely reaches four hundred years here, so this one is at roughly a third of its life.
It is easy to identify: acorns on long stalks, and leaves that sit almost directly on the twig with two small lobes clasping back around it.
Go in October. An oak this age in a good mast year covers the ground beneath it, and a quiet cemetery is one of the few places nobody sweeps them up.
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8
The Turkey Oak of the Coehoornsingel
Turkey Oak (Quercus cerris) · roughly 100 years, from a planting date around 1920-1930 · Binnenstad
Zwolle's own list of special trees names exactly one Turkey oak in the whole city. This is it.
Everything else along the Menno van Coehoornsingel is what a Dutch town plants: limes, beeches, pedunculate oaks. Quercus cerris belongs to southern Europe and Asia Minor, which means somebody chose it deliberately, around 1920 to 1930 by the register's reckoning. The street carries the name of Menno van Coehoorn, the engineer who rebuilt the fortresses of the Dutch Republic against Louis XIV. His earthworks around Zwolle came down in the nineteenth century and the ground was handed to garden designers. This oak went in on that made ground, into a defensive ring that had already been converted into somewhere to walk.
The species gives itself away once you know the tells. Leaves cut into deep, irregular, sharply pointed lobes where the native oak is rounded, and buds sitting in a nest of long thin whiskers. The acorn cups wear the same whiskers, which is why the other name for the tree is the mossy-cupped oak.
The national register lists it as municipal property, protected for dendrological reasons rather than for size or age, which is an unusually honest entry: it is here because it is rare, not because it is enormous. A naturalist photographed and identified it in June 2026, so it is more than a line in a database.
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9
The Copper Beech of Groot Wezenland
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 140 years, from a registered planting date around 1880-1890 · Groot Wezenland, edge of Assendorp
A fence went up beside this beech, and the tree has been taking it in ever since.
The national register says so in its own note: growing space here is tight, and sections of fence have grown into the trunk. That is less dramatic than it sounds and more inevitable. A tree lays a new layer of wood over its entire surface every year and cannot step sideways, so anything left leaning against it long enough ends up inside it. Give a beech a hundred and forty years and it will swallow railings, chains and signs without noticing.
The register puts the planting between 1880 and 1890, on private ground beside a housing complex just off the line of Zwolle's old canal ring. Copper beech was the strong colour of that period of Dutch planting, a mutation of the common beech that has to be grafted rather than grown from seed, and it went wherever a scheme needed its darkest tone. This one has held that job through two world wars and the rebuilding of the street around it.
Zwolle's own 2015 list of special trees records it as well, surveyed by a different office entirely: rode beuk, monumental, privately owned. Two registers, one tree, no argument between them.
What neither of them settles is how close a visitor can actually stand. If you have been, tell us.
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10
The Beech of Ter Pelkwijkpark
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · disputed: register says roughly 140 years, the municipality's 2024 list says roughly 95 years · Binnenstad
Two official bodies have dated this beech and they are fifty years apart.
The national register of monumental trees puts the planting between 1880 and 1890. Zwolle's own 2024 list of special trees, describing the same species in the same park under the same municipal ownership and the same monumental status, says 1930. Neither is a guess by us and neither gets dismissed here. Both are the work of people who went and looked, decades apart, and the honest answer is that this tree is somewhere between about 95 and 145 years old.
The gap changes what it lived through. On the register's dating it was already a substantial tree when German troops entered Zwolle in May 1940. On the municipality's it was a ten year old sapling that grew up through the occupation and the Canadian liberation of the city in April 1945.
What is not in dispute is that it is the odd one out. Ter Pelkwijkpark is an oak park: more than a dozen pedunculate oaks carry register entries here, a dense municipal stand of one species. This beech is the only one of its kind among them, which makes it the easiest tree in the park to find and the hardest to date.
If anyone has a girth measurement, it would settle the argument.
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11
The Plane of the Badhuiswal
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · disputed: register says roughly 160 years, the municipality's 2024 list says roughly 75 years · Binnenstad
This plane is either about 160 years old or about 75, and the two official sources may not be describing the same tree at all.
The national register carries a gewone plataan on the Badhuiswal planted between 1860 and 1870, owned by the municipality, rated monumental. Zwolle's own 2024 list carries a plane on the Badhuiswal planted in 1950, owned by the municipality, rated a tier lower at waardevol. Same street, same owner, same species, ninety years of daylight between them. The Badhuiswal is a short quay and it holds several registered planes and oaks, so the likeliest reading is that two surveys walked past two different trees.
The dating decides what it has seen. On the earlier one it went in while Zwolle was pulling down its old defences and rebuilding the ground as a ring of water and planting, and it has stood on this quay through every war since. On the later one it is a postwar tree, planted into a city five years out of occupation.
Girth would settle it in about a minute, because a plane of 160 years and a plane of 75 are not remotely the same size, and nobody has published a measurement for this one. If you walk past with a tape, tell us what it says.
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12
The Copper Beech of the Badhuiswal
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · disputed: register says roughly 160 years, the municipality's 2024 list says roughly 115 years · Binnenstad
The purple is a mask. A copper beech leaf is loaded with anthocyanin, which sits over the chlorophyll and hides it, so the green is still down there doing the work while the tree looks almost black from across the water.
This one stands on the Badhuiswal, a few steps from the bridge Zwolle calls the Stenen Pijp. Both bodies that have surveyed it call it monumental and municipal property, and both name the copper form rather than the plain beech. They differ only on the date. The national register bands the planting 1860 to 1870; the city's own 2024 list writes it as Fagus sylvatica Atropunicea and puts it at 1910. Same species, same status, same owner, so this is one tree recorded twice with fifty years of uncertainty attached to it. Call it somewhere between 115 and 165 years old and let a girth measurement decide later.
Either dating has it standing on this quay before the first cars came down it, and through the occupation and liberation of the city in the 1940s.
Come in the first half of May rather than midsummer. The new leaves open thin and translucent red, lit from behind, and hold that for a week or two before the pigment thickens and the whole crown settles into its usual near black purple.
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13
The Plane by Restaurant Urbana
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly a century, from planting dates recorded between 1910 and 1930 · Wipstrik
The register says this plane was already standing when the tea house opened. The city's list says the tea house got here first.
Villa Urbana began serving on the Wipstrikkerallee in 1924, an inn and tea house on a long avenue leading out of Zwolle, and it is still a restaurant today under the name Loetje. The national register of monumental trees bands the plane beside it at 1910 to 1920, which puts the tree a few years ahead of the building. Zwolle's own 2024 list records the same species on the same street under the same private ownership and dates it to 1930, which puts it a few years behind. Everything else in the two entries lines up, so the tree is roughly a century old and only the order of arrival is unsettled.
Its condition is not in doubt, and the register is blunt about it: growth and vigour have diminished. This is a plane with a hundred years of roadside city life behind it and a crown that has thinned, rather than one in its prime.
Go for the pairing instead. It stands with a copper beech at a corner of the avenue where people have been sitting outside with a drink for a century.
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14
The Copper Beech by Restaurant Urbana
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · disputed and species detail uncertain: register says roughly 160 years, the municipality's 2024 list may describe a different, younger private beech on the same street · Wipstrik
The national register lists this beech, gives it monumental status, and then leaves two boxes blank. Can you visit it: unknown. Can you see it: unknown.
What the entry does say is specific. A bruine beuk, a copper beech rather than a plain one, on private ground at the Wipstrikkerallee, planted between 1860 and 1870. That dating would make it a grown tree well before Villa Urbana opened as a tea house next door in 1924, and by some distance the oldest thing at this corner of the avenue.
The corroboration is thinner than we would like. Zwolle's 2024 list of special trees records no copper beech on this street at all. It does record a private plain beech here, dated 1940, which is either the same tree written up loosely by a different surveyor or an entirely different one, and the avenue holds more than a dozen registered beeches, so either is possible. The age therefore sits in a wide band, somewhere between about 85 and 165 years.
Both questions come apart with one visit. Purple leaves mean the register has it right, green leaves mean it does not, and either way you will know whether you can stand in front of it. Tell us which.
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15
The Plume Elm of Potgietersingel
Elm (Ulmus sp., a plume-form cultivar; possibly Ulmus x hollandica) · roughly 130 years, from a registered planting date around 1900 · Potgietersingel
The Plume Elm of Potgietersingel does not appear on Zwolle's own list of protected trees. The municipality's 2015 survey of the city's special trees names nineteen elms across town and catalogues the rest of this exact park strip in detail, its maples, oaks, planes and even a tree of heaven, and still skips this one. The only record of it at all is the national Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen, which dates the planting to around 1900 and calls it a Pluimiep, Dutch for plume elm, after its narrow, weeping crown. The register is not settled on what species it actually is: one entry names Ulmus x hollandica, a duplicate entry backs off to Ulmus sp. Dutch elm disease has killed most of the country's old elms since the 1970s, which makes a plume-form specimen from around 1900 still standing, in a public strip the city owns and leaves open at all hours, worth more attention than its own municipality has given it. It stands about a hundred and twenty metres from the park's Copper Beech, part of the same walk. Nobody has settled the exact cultivar, and the page would welcome someone who can.
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16
Huis de Paddestoel's Swamp Cypress
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · roughly 100 years, from a registered planting date around 1920-1930 · Wipstrik
Huis de Paddestoel means Toadstool House, and the bald cypress carrying its name stands where the paperwork about it does not quite agree with itself. The national register lists the tree's address as Herenweg 33, but its own coordinate sits nearly a kilometre away, at Herenweg 131 to 133 in the Wipstrik district, exactly where a 1991 photograph in a local historical archive identifies "Huize de Paddestoel van Schulte Nordholt". The municipality's 2015 survey of the city's protected trees lists only one Taxodium distichum on the entire street, also placed in Wipstrik, also municipally owned, which is almost certainly this same tree rather than a second one nobody else has recorded. Planted somewhere around 1920 to 1930, it now stands close to a century old on the public road verge, at what was once the edge of the private grounds around the house. Bald cypresses are unusual among conifers for dropping their needles every winter, turning a rust orange first, so the tree rewards two visits: one in leaf, one bare. The exact planting year has not been confirmed, so treat the century as an estimate rather than a measurement. The register itself calls the tree visible and open to the public, which the road verge it stands on bears out.
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