Eindhoven's old trees are mostly Philips trees: a chestnut planted in 1909 at gate 11 of the stadium, an oak in the twenty-five hectares Anton Philips gave the city in 1920, a sequoia in the pinetum on the estate his son kept closed until 2025. Five more line the streets of Villapark, the garden suburb Philips built for its executives from 1907. The two that owe Philips nothing are the oldest and best loved: a beech from before the industrial town, and an oak the neighbours light every December.
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1
The Philips Tree
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · about 117 years, from a documented planting in 1909 · Philipsdorp
It has 470 square metres of ground reserved for its roots, in a city centre, next to a football stadium. That is the detail worth knowing: somebody drew a line on a map and decided nothing would ever be built inside it.
Anton Philips had the chestnut planted in 1909 in Philipsdorp, the neighbourhood his company was about to build for its workers. The reasoning was not sentimental. Philips believed staff performed better with something green around them, and the tree went in a year before the first houses did.
So it is older than the district, older than the stadium beside it, and older than the club that plays there, which the company founded in 1913. The houses went up around it, the ground was cleared for the ground, the stands grew, and the chestnut kept its square.
On a match day forty thousand people walk past it and most of them do not look up. Gate 11 is the one to aim for. It is the tree standing in its own patch of open ground while everything else is paving.
Horse chestnuts flower in candles in May and drop conkers in September, which in this spot means several thousand people kicking them across a car park.
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2
De Gevlekte Zuiderling
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 200 years by the national register, closer to 265 by the foundation that named it · Tongelre
On the night of 28 July 2022 three teenagers set this tree on fire. The brigade put it out, the bark and the base of the trunk were charred through, and arborists put its chances of surviving at thirty percent. What they could not tell was whether the heat had cooked the sap flow, and the answer would not be visible until the spring of 2024.
It came back. Thirty strong shoots pushed up from the ground around the trunk, and rather than clear them a specialist began weaving them together, using an American technique, into a living scaffold that will hold the old trunk up as it rots over the next thirty years. A crowdfunder raised eleven thousand euro. The burnt platform around the base was cut away by hand so the roots were not disturbed.
It stands 28 metres tall with a trunk eight metres round at the base, in the park of a castle that was demolished in 1872. In October 2009 it became the first Wereldboom in the Netherlands.
Its age is disputed. The foundation that named it says planted around 1760; the national register says the 1820s. Nobody has cored it.
Go and look at the black trunk and the young growth climbing it.
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3
The Oak of De Wielewaal
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 170 to 180 years, from the register's planting band of 1850 to 1860 · Strijp
For a hundred years you could not come here. This was the private estate of Frits Philips, who built the house in 1934 and lived in it until he died in 2005, on land his father Anton had bought in 1912 when it was a farm called Het Zwarte Huis. The city bought the whole thing in 2022 for twenty nine million euro and opened it to the public on 27 September 2025.
It is 144 hectares, three times the size of the Vondelpark, and entry is free.
This oak was already standing when Anton Philips arrived. In 1850 the ground here was open heath; it was planted up over the second half of the century, and by 1897 the map showed pine wood cut through by avenues of oak. This is one of those avenue trees, which is why it is a good deal older than most of what surrounds it.
The estate is large enough that the pin marks the surveyed position rather than a spot you can stand on and be certain. Come in from Oirschotsedijk and follow the old avenue lines; they are still legible in the way the wood is laid out, and the oaks along them are the thick ones.
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4
The Giant Sequoia of the Wielewaal Pinetum
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · roughly 105 to 115 years, from the register's planting band of 1910 to 1920 · Strijp
In 1912 Anton Philips bought a farm on the heath and immediately started collecting conifers. He laid out a pinetum, a star wood with paths radiating from a single point, a maze and a rockery, which tells you what kind of man he was about land: it was to be arranged.
This is one of the trees from that planting, a giant sequoia, a species from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada that had been in European gardens for about sixty years when it went in here. In California they are the largest living things on earth. In a Brabant pinetum a hundred-year-old one is a tall, red-brown column with bark you can push your fist into, soft and fibrous and thick enough to have evolved against forest fire.
It has a long way to go. Sequoias run to three thousand years and this one is barely out of its first century, which is the pleasant thing about standing under it: on its own timescale, the entire Philips story happened this morning.
The pinetum is signposted from the Oirschotsedijk entrance. Look for the conifer that is obviously wider than everything around it.
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5
The Oak by the Wilhelmina Monument
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 170 to 180 years, from the register's planting band of 1850 to 1860 · Strijp
In 1920 Anton Philips and his wife Anna de Jongh gave twenty five hectares of wood to the people of Eindhoven. They had bought it as pine plantation in 1912, turned it into something you could walk in, and handed it over after the neighbouring municipality of Strijp was absorbed into the city. The garden architect D. F. Tersteeg laid it out in the English landscape manner, grass opening into stands of trees, and it opened as a park in 1924.
This oak was there before any of that. The register puts it in the 1850s, which makes it sixty years older than the purchase and a survivor of whatever stood here when the ground was still being planted up from heath.
That is worth holding in mind while you look at it. The park is a designed thing, made by a company for its workers and then given away. The oak is not part of the design. It was simply already standing where somebody later decided to put a path.
It stands to the left of the path running to the Wilhelmina monument. The park was fully renovated in 2009, so the surroundings are tidier than the tree.
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6
The Copper Beech of the Glorieuxpark
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 275 to 325 years, from the register's planting band of 1700 to 1750 · Stratum
This is the oldest thing standing in Eindhoven, by a wide margin and by the register's own dating: a planting band of 1700 to 1750, so somewhere between about 275 and 325 years. Everything else on this page is a Philips tree. This one was full grown before the family arrived.
The ground has changed hands and purpose repeatedly around it. It was the Eikenburg estate; in 1894 the Brothers of Charity bought it and opened a boys' boarding school, adding pavilions over the decades; the boarding school closed in 1996 for lack of pupils, and care and education organisations moved into the buildings. The main house, the old school, the chapel and a mounted statue of Saint George are all listed national monuments. A religious order still owns the park, and the register records it as visitable.
One honest note. This park also held the thickest beech in the whole of North Brabant, and it is gone: a large part of its crown came down on its own in September 2013 and the remaining trunk was taken out. That was a different tree, a green beech, and the register recorded this one eleven years afterwards. If you go and find this one has followed it, tell us.
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7
De Lichtjesboom
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 100 to 110 years, from the register's planting band of 1920 to 1930 · Gijzenrooi
Every December the neighbourhood covers this oak in fairy lights, and keeps them on through January. It is not a municipal display and nobody is paid to do it. That is why the street knows it as the lichtjesboom, the little lights tree, rather than by anything the register calls it.
The rest of the year it is a good ordinary oak of about a century, standing clear of the houses in the strip of planting along the Diepmeerven, well enough placed that you see the whole shape of it from the pavement. The street name probably points at the Diepe Meerven, a small heath pool a way off toward Heeze, which is what this whole district was before it was a district.
It is the smallest tree on this page and the only one on it because of what people do with it. Eindhoven is a city that thinks about light more than most, having spent a century making it, and the version that matters here is a hundred bulbs strung through an oak by people who live on the street.
Go in December. In August you will see an oak.
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8
The Copper Beech of Sint Trudo Churchyard
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 130 years · Strijp
Strijp was its own village until 1919, and this copper beech is older than the annexation that folded it into Eindhoven. It stands in the churchyard of the Sint Trudokerk, part of a monumental avenue of beeches that lines the entrance on both sides, graves running in rows beneath them toward a small hill topped with a cross.
The church itself has had a rough run for a building not yet a century and a half old: consecrated in 1887, damaged by fire in 1936, rebuilt with a new tower over 1937 and 1938, then bomb damaged again in 1944, with repairs not finished until 1949. The beech avenue beside it, planted in the 1890s, predates every one of those disasters and outlasted them all.
The tree register lists three more copper beeches within a stone's throw, close enough together that they read as one avenue rather than four separate specimens worth visiting on their own. This is the one the register singles out by coordinate, multi-stemmed and roughly 130 years old, in an ordinary Catholic churchyard that has quietly kept growing through a century its own parish church did not get to enjoy.
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9
The Box Elder of Antonius Kerkhof
Box Elder (Acer negundo) · roughly 100 years · Villapark / Doctor Berlagelaan area
This box elder outlived the parish that planted it. The Antonius kerkhof belonged to a Eindhoven congregation nicknamed the Steentjeskerk, split off from the older Trudo parish in 1919 and folded back into it in 1977 when it could no longer stand alone. The tree, planted sometime in the 1920s, has stood through the whole rise and fall.
The national tree register flags it for two reasons at once, rare for this kind of entry: real aesthetic value, and a species genuinely uncommon in this part of the country. Box elder is an ordinary enough tree across much of North America, but a century old specimen singled out by an official Dutch register is a different thing, and this small, half forgotten churchyard is where it happens to be growing.
The cemetery itself closed to new burials in 2007, taking only urns since, which is usually how a place like this drifts toward being quietly overlooked. It has not been: it still opens daily from ten to five, still belongs to an active parish, and this tree is one of several worth the walk inside its low walls.
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10
The Nordmann Firs of Antonius Kerkhof
Nordmann Fir (Abies nordmanniana) · roughly 100 years · Villapark / Doctor Berlagelaan area
The world's most popular Christmas tree does not usually get old enough to become a monument. Nordmann fir is grown by the millions and cut down each December long before it can reach any real age, so a stand of three growing undisturbed in the Antonius kerkhof for roughly a century is exactly the kind of anomaly a tree register exists to flag.
Planted in the 1920s in this small Catholic churchyard, once the burial ground of a parish nicknamed the Steentjeskerk before it merged back into the older Trudo parish in 1977, the three firs stand together as one dark, upright stand rather than as separate trees to find one by one. Nobody appears to have written about them beyond the register that designates them, which is unsurprising: a conifer doing exactly what a conifer does, only for a hundred years instead of one winter, is a quiet kind of remarkable.
They stand a few dozen metres from the churchyard's box elder and its oak by the gate, close enough to see all three on one short visit. The churchyard opens daily, ten to five, free, no ticket, evergreen whatever the season.
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11
The Oak at the Gate of Antonius Kerkhof
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 100 years · Villapark / Doctor Berlagelaan area
This oak is the first tree anyone meets walking into the Antonius kerkhof, standing just inside the gate beside the old caretaker's house. It was only recently added to the national tree register, which is a different thing from being recently planted: it has stood here since sometime in the 1920s, a full century, and simply went unrecorded until somebody finally looked.
The churchyard it guards belonged to a parish nicknamed the Steentjeskerk, briefly independent from the older Trudo parish from 1919 until the two merged back together in 1977. Burials stopped here in 2007, urns only since, but the gate still opens daily and the oak still does the job an entrance tree does anywhere: mark the threshold, offer shade to whoever pauses before going further in.
Further in stand a box elder and a group of three Nordmann firs, both also drawn from the same register and both worth the same short walk. None of the three has much written about it beyond the register that designates it, which is the honest state of a small churchyard nobody has thought to study closely, only to protect.
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12
The Catalpa of the Van Abbemuseum
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · around a century old (sources disagree on the decade) · Eindhoven city centre, on the Dommel beside the Van Abbemuseum
Nobody can say whether this catalpa or the museum beside it came first. The national tree register puts its planting between 1900 and 1910. Eindhoven's own tree database, refreshed this month, records 1930. Both are official, both list the tree as monumental, and the gap between them is a generation. It matters here, because the Van Abbemuseum went up in 1936, built by A.J. Kropholler for the cigar manufacturer Henri van Abbe to hold his collection. On the register's dating the tree was already thirty years old and watched the building arrive on its doorstep. On the city's dating it went in six years before the builders did. We have not picked a winner between the two.
What is not in dispute: this is a southern catalpa of fifteen to eighteen metres, on the public green strip between the museum and the Dommel, and it is not alone. Four more catalpas stand within thirty five metres, all of them carrying the same monumental rating in the city's records. Catalpa comes from the southeastern United States, and it keeps American hours: it is one of the last trees in a Dutch park to come into leaf, so in April this corner still looks bare while everything around it has gone green. By July the crown is full of white flowers marked in yellow and purple.
If you know when these were planted, tell us.
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13
The Cedar of Pastoor Sickingstraat
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · about 95 years · Joriskwartier, Stratum
Eindhoven's own tree database contradicts itself about this tree. One field of the record calls it a blue Atlas cedar. Another field in the same record gives the species as Cedrus libani, the cedar of Lebanon, which is what the national register calls it as well. The two registers point at the same spot, less than three metres apart, so this is one tree wearing two labels rather than two trees. The species are close relatives and genuinely hard to tell apart: both hold their branches out flat in layers, both carry short needles in tufts, and it is the cones and the needle detail that settle the question. We have listed it as the cedar of Lebanon because two of the three entries say so, and we are flagging the disagreement rather than tidying it away. If you can settle it standing underneath, tell us.
The rest is plainer. The city dates the planting to 1930, which puts the tree at about ninety-five years, and records it at fifteen to eighteen metres. The national register lists its history as unknown, which is a register's way of saying nobody ever wrote anything down about it.
Its surroundings are far younger than it is. The Joriskwartier went up mostly around 2006, by which time this cedar had been standing for some seventy-five years. It now holds a layered evergreen crown over a paved street, in a neighbourhood built around it.
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14
The Honey Locust of the Stadspaviljoen
Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) · about a century old (sources disagree on the decade) · Stadswandelpark, Stratum
This honey locust stands more than twenty-four metres tall, which the species almost never manages in the Netherlands. Gleditsia triacanthos is an American tree from the Mississippi basin, planted in European cities for its fine feathery leaflets and its indifference to bad air, and it usually stops well short of that height here. Eindhoven's tree survey files this one in its top band, above twenty-four metres. The national register lists it on dendrological grounds, which is a register saying the tree earns its protection for what it is rather than for anything that happened to it.
Its age is disputed. The register bands the planting between 1890 and 1900, which would make it about 130 years old. The city's record says 1940, which would make it 86. Nobody has reconciled the two and we are not going to pick one for them.
It stands behind the Stadspaviljoen, once the coach house of Landgoed Den Elzent. The tobacco manufacturer H.F.C. Coolen sold that estate in 1876 to the Amsterdam merchant B.H.A. Sinkel, who had Leonard Springer lay the grounds out as a landscape garden. Eindhoven opened them to the public in 1921 and named the place Stadswandelpark ten years later. The corner is a group rather than a single specimen: beeches, pin oaks, black locusts and a sweet chestnut a few steps away, all of them monumental in the city's records.
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15
The Sweet Chestnut of the Stadspaviljoen
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · about a century old (sources disagree on the decade) · Stadswandelpark, Stratum
Two registers place this chestnut within eighty centimetres of each other and disagree about its age by fifty years. The national register bands the planting 1890 to 1900. Eindhoven's own tree database says 1940. The position is settled and the age is not, which is the usual shape of these things: somebody once stood under the tree with a GPS, and nobody ever counted anything.
The species is not in dispute. A sweet chestnut in a Dutch park is a food tree that stopped being used as one. Castanea sativa came north with the Romans, who ground the nuts into flour, and it fed people across southern Europe for centuries afterwards. This one reaches fifteen to eighteen metres, hangs cream catkins in July, and in October drops spiny burrs into the grass, where the squirrels reach them first.
It stands behind the Stadspaviljoen, a few dozen metres from the honey locust, which makes the pair one short walk rather than two separate errands. The pavilion was the coach house of Landgoed Den Elzent, a private country estate on the edge of town until Eindhoven opened the grounds to the public in 1921. The trees in this corner are a set rather than a scatter: beeches, pin oaks and black locusts, all of them monumental in the city's records, dated by the city to 1910 and 1940.
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16
The Plane of Marienhage
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about a century old (sources disagree on the decade) · Eindhoven city centre, on the Dommel
This plane stands more than twenty-four metres tall and you cannot see it from the street. It grows behind Marienhage on the bank of the Dommel, screened by the buildings, and the national register says as much in its own fields: reachable, but not visible from the road.
There has been a religious house on this ground since 1419, when Augustinian hermits founded a cloister on the river outside what was then a small town. The complex was rebuilt in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, ran as a monastery and a school for generations, and was sold in 2017. It is a hotel and a cultural venue now, which is a strange fate for a cloister and a fortunate one for the tree, since the garden came with it.
How old the plane is depends on which register you ask. The national one bands the planting between 1880 and 1890, which would make it about 140. Eindhoven's own tree database says 1935, which makes it 91. Neither source explains the other and we have not picked a side.
Getting to it asks a little faith in the map. Public footpaths run through the riverside grounds, the site's redevelopment plan undertook to open the garden, and Marienhage is a marked stop on the Dommelpad walking route. None of that proves the path takes you within sight of this particular tree, so go expecting a short hunt along the water.
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17
The Horse Chestnut of Prinsenhof
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 120 years, from a registered planting date around 1910 · Villapark
Eindhoven's monumental trees keep turning out to be Philips trees, and this one fits the pattern from an unusual angle: not a company gift but a plan. In 1907 the Villapark district went up as a garden suburb for Philips executives, laid out street by street with imported ornamental species, and the municipality's own tree management survey names this one specifically as a double-flowered cultivar of the ordinary horse chestnut, chosen on purpose rather than planted from whatever the nursery had spare that year.
The national monumental tree register and the city's separate street-tree inventory agree closely on where it stands and roughly when it went in, within a few years of 1900 either way. Two independently kept lists landing on the same tree and the same decade is rare enough here to be worth saying outright, since most entries in this project carry one source repeating what the other cannot check.
It stands on the street verge of Prinsenhof, in a district still recognisable as the plan that built it, protected now as a townscape rather than a nature reserve. The chestnut that gave Eindhoven its stadium tree and its avenue at the Wielewaal did not plant this one. Its own street did.
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18
The Caucasian Wingnut of Frederika van Pruisenweg
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · roughly 120 years, from a registered planting date around 1910 · Villapark
A wingnut on a residential verge is an odd choice, which is the point. The Villapark district went up from 1907 as a garden suburb built for Philips executives, and whoever planted its streets reached past the ordinary lime and plane for something a passer-by would not recognise: Pterocarya fraxinifolia, native to the Caucasus and Iran, a relative of the walnut whose true claim to fame is a chain of winged seed pods that hangs off the branches like a string of pale green fish, sometimes half a metre long, through late summer.
The national monumental tree register and the city's own street-tree survey agree on the species and land within two metres of each other on where it stands, both pointing to a planting around 1910. Neither source records a girth.
It grows on Frederika van Pruisenweg, one street over from the district's chestnuts and its pin oak, all part of the same deliberate planting that turned a stretch of Philips-era Eindhoven into an outdoor collection of trees nobody expected to find on a Dutch street.
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19
The Pin Oak of Prinsenhof
Pin Oak (Quercus palustris) · roughly 130 years, from a registered planting date around 1900 · Villapark
The tightest date on any tree in this Eindhoven cluster comes from a disagreement of exactly ten years. The national monumental tree register bands this pin oak's planting to 1890 through 1900; the city's own separate street-tree survey names a single year inside that band, 1890, and the two records sit within four metres of each other on the ground. A register that admits a wide guess and a city inventory that commits to a year rarely meet this closely, and when they do the tighter figure is usually the one worth repeating.
A pin oak is not a native to be found lining a Dutch street by accident. Villapark was laid out from 1907 as a garden suburb for Philips executives, its verges deliberately planted with species that read as a collection rather than a default, and this Quercus palustris, with its fine drooping lower branches and leaves that stay reddish-bronze on the tree through much of winter, is one of them.
It stands on Prinsenhof, the same street as the district's double-flowered horse chestnut, a two-minute walk apart.
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20
The Southern Catalpa of Julianastraat
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · roughly 120 years, from a registered planting date around 1910 · Villapark
Only one source names this tree, and it is honest about not being sure of everything either. The national monumental tree register lists a Catalpa on Julianastraat, planted sometime in the 1900s, but gives no house number for it and marks its own visibility field unknown. The city's separate street-tree management inventory, which independently confirmed three of this cluster's other trees to within a few metres, has no Catalpa recorded anywhere near this point at all.
That gap does not mean the tree is wrong, only that it is unconfirmed a second way, which is the honest way to leave it rather than a reason to leave it out. A Catalpa bignonioides at roughly 120 years old would be a distinctive planting for this corner of the Villapark garden suburb, laid out from 1907 with deliberately varied ornamental species along its verges: broad heart-shaped leaves, white orchid-like flowers in early summer, and long thin seed pods that hang on through winter and give the tree its old nickname, the cigar tree.
If you know this tree or can measure it, tell us. A second source is the only thing standing between a flag and a confirmed entry.
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21
The Horse Chestnut of Palingstraat
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 120 years, from a registered planting date around 1910 · Villapark
This chestnut and the double-flowered one on Prinsenhof, about 250 metres away, are two different trees carrying the same common name and the same rough age, which is worth saying plainly so nobody mistakes one for the other. Only the national monumental tree register names this one: a white horse chestnut on the public road verge at the junction of Palingstraat and Karel de Grotelaan, planted somewhere in the 1900s, owned and maintained by the municipality.
The city's own separate street-tree survey, checked within 25 metres of this spot, records no horse chestnut here at all, only a silver lime from 1920 and a black lime from 1985 a short distance off. That is not evidence the register is wrong, registers and management inventories are compiled differently and do not always list the same trees, but it means this one stands on one source rather than two, and the entry says so honestly.
It grows in the Villapark district, the Philips-era garden suburb planted from 1907, on a street corner rather than in a garden, open to anyone walking past.
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