Kasteel Helmond has stood here for nearly seven hundred years, and until the middle of the last century it sat in a large landscape park. Most of that went after 1921, when the last private owner sold up. Seven trees here still stand in what is left of the grounds, one a Chinese beech the register calls the oldest of its kind in the country. The rest of the page is a cemetery planted almost entirely in weeping trees, an oak beside a tower from about 1400, and an oak somebody wrote a book about.
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1
The Silver Maple of the Castle Park
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · roughly 125 to 135 years, from the register's planting band of 1890 to 1900 · Kasteelplein
This tree is a fragment of something much larger that no longer exists.
Kasteel Helmond has been standing in the middle of this town for nearly seven hundred years, a moated brick castle that is now the town hall and museum. Until the middle of the twentieth century it sat inside a big landscape park, the kind that a private owner maintains and a town cannot. In 1921 the last private owner sold the castle, and most of the park went in the decades that followed, built over or reorganised into something smaller.
The silver maple, planted between 1890 and 1900, belongs to that vanished park. So do three other trees on this page. Together they are the best physical evidence of what used to be here.
Silver maple is North American and was planted for speed and for its leaf, which is cut into five narrow lobes and is bright silver-white on the underside, so the crown flashes pale whenever there is wind.
It does one more thing worth timing a visit for. It flowers in March, in small red and yellow tufts directly on the bare twigs, weeks before anything around it moves.
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2
The Old Oak of Farmer Peeters
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 195 to 205 years, from the register's planting band of 1820 to 1830 · Brouwhuis
Somebody wrote a book about the trees of this town, and because of it we know what this oak is called.
The national register does not usually explain its own names. Here it does: the tree is listed as de oude eik van boer Peeters, and the register says the name comes from 'Grote en kleine geschiedenissen rond bomen in Helmond en omgeving' by Maria van de Looverbosch, a collection of large and small histories of the trees in and around Helmond.
That chain is worth appreciating. A local writer went round asking about trees, wrote down what people called them, published it, and a national government survey later read the book and used the name. Farmer Peeters himself has vanished entirely.
The oak is banded 1820 to 1830, so it is about two centuries old and stands at Brouwhuis on the Rijnlaan, in what is now a housing district on what was farmland when it was planted.
That is the fate of most old farm oaks that survive: the fields go, the buildings arrive, and the tree ends up in a green strip with a street name around it and a farmer's name attached.
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3
The Oak at the Old Tower
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 165 to 175 years, from the register's planting band of 1850 to 1860 · Stiphout
The tower dates from about 1400 and the oak from about 1855, which is a gap of four and a half centuries between two things standing side by side.
The Oude Toren at Stiphout is a church tower without its church, which is a common enough sight in this country and always means the same thing: the nave was replaced or demolished and the tower, being solid and expensive to remove and usually owned separately, stayed. What is left is a tall brick object standing alone with a graveyard around it.
The oak came far later. It is banded 1850 to 1860 and at roughly 170 years it is at about a third of its likely span, which means that if it is left alone it will eventually catch up on the tower in a way nothing else here will.
That is the reason to come, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. Two hundred years from now a visitor will find a tower from 1400 and an oak from 1855, and the difference between them will look far smaller than it does today.
Go in winter, when the bare frame reads against the brick.
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4
The Beech of the Hunting Wood
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 145 to 155 years, from the register's planting band of 1870 to 1880 · Horst
The wood this beech stands in is a leftover piece of the hunting ground of the lords of Helmont, and the register knows what the farmhands used to eat in it.
The pool here is called the spekstreuvelvenneke and it has always been there. The name comes from what happened around it: farm workers took their midday meal at this spot, and what they ate was spekstruif, a bacon pancake. That is the level of detail a national tree register does not usually carry, and it survives because somebody local made sure it did.
The wood shows on a map of 1890. It is a relict, a fragment of a much older hunting landscape that the farming and building around it never quite absorbed.
The beech, banded 1870 to 1880, is a purple one, which in a fragment of old hunting wood is an incomer: somebody planted it deliberately in a place that had otherwise simply been left.
Go in October, when it turns copper, and find the pool. The pancake is not provided.
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5
The Oak of the Castle Park
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 135 to 145 years, from the register's planting band of 1880 to 1890 · Kasteelplein
The oldest of the four survivors in the castle grounds, and the one most likely to outlast the rest by centuries.
It was planted between 1880 and 1890, when Kasteel Helmond was still a private house sitting in a large landscape park, four decades before the sale that led to most of that park disappearing. A native oak in a nineteenth century park was not the fashionable choice; the fashion was for silver maples, copper beeches and conifers from other continents, all of which are also on this page. Oak was the sober option, planted by somebody thinking further ahead than their own lifetime.
That turned out to be the right call. Pedunculate oak routinely reaches four hundred years in this country. The silver maple beside it will be lucky to see two hundred.
A castle that has stood for nearly seven centuries with an oak that might manage half of that is a decent pairing, and it is the sort of arithmetic that only becomes visible when you know the numbers.
Acorns on long stalks in October, and a great many of them on a tree with this much room.
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6
The Silver Lime of the Castle Park
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · roughly 95 to 105 years, from the register's planting band of 1920 to 1930 · Kasteelplein
This one was planted just after the castle changed hands, which makes it the last generation of the old park rather than a survivor of it.
The sale came in 1921 and the landscape park largely went in the decades after. A silver lime banded 1920 to 1930 is therefore standing on the hinge: planted around the moment the private estate ended and the public use began, into grounds that were about to stop being anybody's private garden.
Silver lime is the best of the limes to meet in person, for a reason you can see from across the grounds. Every leaf is covered underneath in a fine white felt, so in the slightest wind the crown turns over and flickers between deep green and pale silver. Nothing else this size does it.
It has a darker habit too. It flowers late, in July, and its nectar is hard on bumblebees, so under a big one in high summer you will sometimes find them on the ground. The reasons are argued over and the current reading is more about a starving late-season insect finding a huge low-value food source than about poison.
July, then, for the scent.
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7
The Horse Chestnut of the Castle Park
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 95 to 105 years, from the register's planting band of 1920 to 1930 · Kasteelplein
A horse chestnut in a castle park is a tree planted for children, whether or not anyone admitted it at the time.
The conkers are the point. They ripen in September, the spiny green cases split on the ground, and what falls out is the glossiest object in northern European botany, a deep mahogany brown that fades within days of being picked up. Every generation discovers this independently at about the age of six.
This one is banded 1920 to 1930, so it went in just after the castle was sold in 1921 and the private landscape park began to break up. Planting a chestnut at that moment, in grounds that were becoming public, reads like somebody thinking about the town rather than about a garden.
The species is having a hard century. Bleeding canker has killed many mature trees since the 1990s, and the leaf miner moth, here since about 2002, browns the foliage of nearly every horse chestnut in the country from July onward.
So come in early May for the white candles, before the miner starts, or in September for the conkers. Not August.
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8
The Chinese Beech of the Castle Park
Chinese Beech (Fagus engleriana) · roughly 95 to 105 years, from the register's planting band of 1920 to 1930 · Kasteelplein
The national register lists this tree's species as European beech. The register's own description of it disagrees, at length.
What that description says is that this is a Chinese beech, Fagus engleriana, a species almost nobody plants here, and that as far as anyone knows it is the oldest and thickest one in the Netherlands. It also says the thing that makes it worth the detour: it does not stand out. In grounds holding a silver maple, a silver lime, two horse chestnuts and a century-old oak, the rare tree is the plain one.
The register files it under three headings that between them explain the confusion. Rare species in the region. Of national importance. Clearly visible to the public.
It is grafted, low to the ground, onto the rootstock of an ordinary European beech, which is presumably where the species field got its answer. A nurseryman quoted in the entry gives the reason for the graft: seed of this species will not germinate in this country, so a Chinese beech in Dutch soil has to be carried on Dutch roots.
The town's own records put the planting at 1930. The single independent record of its size gives 2.06 metres round and 16.4 metres tall. For a European beech that would be ordinary. For this species in this country it is, apparently, the record.
Nobody has checked that ranking. If you know of a bigger one, tell us.
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9
The Holly of the Castle Park
Common Holly (Ilex aquifolium) · roughly 75 to 85 years, from the register's planting band of 1940 to 1950 · Kasteelplein
This is the one tree in the castle park you will have to hunt for, and the register says so itself: it marks the holly as not visible from any path.
Holly is a strange thing to find on a monumental tree register at all. It is usually a shrub, it grows slowly, and at seventy-five to eighty-five years old this one is nowhere near the bulk of the maple, the lime or the two chestnuts around it. The register protected it anyway, and it wrote down a different reason for doing so. Every other tree in these grounds is listed as monumentaal. This one is listed as dendrologisch, a botanical specimen rather than a landmark.
What it does not say is which botanical quality earned the listing. Its history field for this entry is a single word: onbekend. Unknown.
The date is the other thing worth knowing. The band runs 1940 to 1950, which puts the planting somewhere across the war and the years directly after it. Nothing else on this page went in that late.
Holly is dioecious, so only a female plant carries the red berries everyone associates with it. Nobody has recorded which this is. If you get there in December and find berries, tell us and we will write it down.
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10
The Younger Horse Chestnut of the Castle Park
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 85 to 95 years, from the register's planting band of 1930 to 1940 · Kasteelplein
There are two horse chestnuts in these grounds, and on paper the only thing separating them is ten years.
This is the younger. The register bands it 1930 to 1940; the other, about fifty metres east, is banded 1920 to 1930. They carry separate entry numbers and separate coordinates, so this is two trees rather than one tree counted twice, which is a thing registers do often enough to be worth checking.
The decade matters more here than it usually would. Kasteel Helmond was sold by its last private owner in 1921 and the landscape park around it broke up over the years that followed. The older chestnut's band straddles that sale. This one's does not. Anything planted between 1930 and 1940 went into grounds that had already stopped being anybody's private garden.
The species is having a bad century in this country. Bleeding canker has been killing mature trees since the 1990s, and the leaf miner moth browns the foliage of nearly every horse chestnut in the Netherlands from July onward.
Which is why May is the month. The flowers stand upright over the whole crown in white candles, for two or three weeks, before anything has gone wrong with the leaves.
Only the register records this one. If you get there and it is gone, tell us and it comes off the page.
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11
The Variegated Cedar of the Julianalaan
Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) · roughly 95 to 105 years, from the register's planting band of 1920 to 1930 · Oranjebuurt
In the Pacific Northwest this species reaches sixty metres and can live past a thousand years. This one stands on a square in a Helmond housing district, is about a century old, and is splashed with cream and gold.
The register calls it a bonte reuzenlevensboom, a variegated giant arborvitae, and then stops. Which variegated form it is, it does not say, and no other source names one. Several are in cultivation and telling them apart takes somebody standing underneath with a key. If you know which this is, tell us.
Variegation is not an advantage. Pale tissue carries less chlorophyll, so a variegated plant grows slower than its plain green parent and holds its place in a planting purely because somebody liked the look of it. Getting to a hundred years with that handicap, on a public square rather than in a sheltered garden, is the part worth respecting.
The register logs the setting as a plein, a square, and the owner as the municipality, so this was town planting from the start rather than a garden specimen that a street later grew around. It is banded 1920 to 1930, and the register's history field for it is blank.
Crush a spray of the foliage between your fingers when you get there. Thuja plicata smells of pineapple.
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12
The Weeping Beech of the Molenstraat Cemetery
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · roughly 115 to 125 years, from the register's planting band of 1900 to 1910 · Molenstraat
Almost everything planted at this cemetery weeps. A dendrological survey of the ground lists, besides this beech, a weeping elm, weeping poplars, a weeping ash, a weeping acacia, a weeping lime and cypresses.
That is not an accident of taste. Nineteenth century burial grounds used pendulous forms deliberately, and a Dutch cemetery of the 1880s was working from the same nursery catalogues as everywhere else in Europe. Somebody ordered the mood along with the trees.
The cemetery was founded in 1880 as an expansion of an older Catholic burial ground on the Molenstraat, laid out with a central path and a Calvary mount, and it is a general public cemetery today. The beech is banded 1900 to 1910, so it arrived a generation after the ground was consecrated, into a plan that already had its shape. Nobody has dated it more precisely than that decade.
A weeping beech is one tree pretending to be a room. The branches arch out and then fall vertically to the ground, and a mature one encloses a space underneath that you can walk into. This one has had a century to build it.
The register marks it as not visible from the path, which in a cemetery full of weeping trees is a specific problem rather than a general one. Go by the leaf.
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13
The Silver Maple of the Molenstraat Cemetery
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · roughly 135 to 145 years, from the register's planting band of 1880 to 1890 · Molenstraat
The register thinks this tree is as old as the ground it stands on, and it hedges the claim rather than making it. Its note reads: probably planted around 1880 at the opening of the cemetery.
That is a guess admitting it is a guess, which is worth more than a confident date. The Molenstraat cemetery was founded in 1880 as an expansion of an older Catholic burial ground, laid out with a central path and a Calvary mount, and the maple's planting band of 1880 to 1890 sits across that opening. A tree put in at a cemetery's founding has a job to do: it is there to be the thing that is already large when the first mourners arrive.
Silver maple is North American and grows fast, which is how it got into so many nineteenth century plantings on this side of the Atlantic. The bark breaks into long shaggy plates with age. The leaf is cut into five narrow lobes and is silver-white underneath, so the whole crown flickers pale whenever there is wind.
One thing to expect on arrival: the register logs this entry as two trees rather than one, so look for a pair.
The other silver maple on this page stands in the castle park across town, banded 1890 to 1900. This is the older of the two.
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14
The Copper Beech of the Kromme Steenweg
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · about 130 years, planted 1890-1900 · Centrum
Nobody has ever put a tape around this tree, which is the first thing a big copper beech makes you want to do.
The purple leaf is a mutation. It turns up now and then among ordinary green beeches and gets propagated on purpose, because people liked the colour enough to keep it going. Dutch calls the result a rode beuk, a red beech, which is closer to what the leaf actually does: it opens red in spring and darkens through the summer until it reads almost black against a grey sky.
This one went into a municipal green strip on the Kromme Steenweg somewhere between 1890 and 1900. The national monumental tree register gives that decade band and does not narrow it, so neither do we. Helmond's own tree catalogue, the 2009 amendment that put the town's protected trees on a map, lists it at number 4 in the company of a horse chestnut and two planes.
That is the entire documented record. No girth, no height, no note of who chose it or why. What is on the ground is a large purple beech on a public verge, nine minutes' walk from the centre of town, still on the protected list seventeen years after that catalogue was drawn up.
If you know its measurements, or when it went in, tell us.
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15
The Plane Tree of Weg op den Heuvel
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 190 years, planted 1830-1840 · Stationskwartier
The water this plane tree was planted beside is gone. The Ameide, a branch of the river Aa, ran along here between shored banks. It has since been built over, and the tree now stands on a strip of municipal grass beside Helmond's Stadskantoor.
Only one source describes this specimen: the Dutch national register of monumental trees. It is an official one, but it is still a single voice, and its account of the tree argues with itself. The planting band it records is 1830 to 1840, which is where the age on this page comes from. Its history note ties the tree instead to the house of the physician Holtus, which stood next to it and dates from around 1870. A generation apart, and nobody has settled it.
What the register is unambiguous about is the shape. Meerstammig, it says: multi-stemmed. This is not a single column but several trunks leaving the ground together.
London plane is itself a hybrid, an accidental cross between the oriental and the American plane that turned out to shrug off soot, salt and hard pruning. Nineteenth century Europe planted it along everything for exactly that reason. The reward for the pedestrian is the bark, which sheds in irregular plates and leaves the trunk in patches of cream, olive and grey.
The house is still there. The river is not.
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16
The South Oak of the Warande
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 170 years, planted 1850-1860 · Warande
The Warande is older than any tree standing in it. The park took its present shape in 1757, and the oldest plantings anyone can still point to date from 1834, which means the first eighty years of it have gone.
This oak belongs to the generation that replaced them. The national register puts it in the 1850s and calls it one of the few specimens left from the mid nineteenth century layout of the park. It gets a coordinate of its own rather than being counted into the stand around it.
That generation is thinning. In 2018 one of its contemporaries came down elsewhere in the same park, an oak grown from an acorn around 1865 and about 150 years old when it fell.
Oak is the dominant tree here and it was planted in straight lanes, which is what the nineteenth century did with a wood: rows you can see down, so a walker always has a view of something.
One warning the register hands over itself. This tree is marked as not visible from a path. It stands inside the stand rather than along the edge of it, so reaching it means stepping off the lane and in among the trunks. The park is free and open at all hours, and the small zoo inside it is free as well.
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17
The North Oak of the Warande
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 170 years, planted 1850-1860 · Warande
Pedunculate means stalked, and the stalk belongs to the acorn rather than to the tree. That is the whole trick for telling this oak apart from the sessile oak it is usually confused with. Quercus robur hangs its acorns out on long stems and sits its leaves almost directly on the twig; the other one does exactly the reverse.
This is the northern of the two oaks in the Warande that carry an entry of their own in the Dutch national register, about 470 metres from the other. Both are dated to the 1850s, both are described as survivors of the mid nineteenth century replanting of the park, and both are marked in the register as standing inside the wood rather than beside a path, which is a polite way of saying you will have to go and find them.
The park is much older than either. It took its present form in 1757, and the oldest plantings still standing date from 1834. Oak took over from there and never handed the ground back: it is still the dominant species here, still arranged in the straight lanes a nineteenth century designer would have drawn.
Neither oak has ever been measured. No girth, no height, no record of who put them in. If you get a tape around this one, we would like the number.
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18
The Nootka Cypress of the Protestant Cemetery
Nootka Cypress (Cupressus nootkatensis) · not documented · Molenstraat
Botanists have moved this species between genera more than once and are not obviously finished. Older books file it as Chamaecyparis nootkatensis, newer ones as Cupressus nootkatensis, and a few as Xanthocyparis. In Dutch it is simply the nootkacipres, and nobody argues about that.
Wherever it is filed, it comes from a long way off. Its home range is the Pacific coast of North America, from Alaska down through British Columbia, on cold wet slopes above the sea. This one grows in a Protestant burial ground on the eastern edge of Helmond, the better part of eight thousand kilometres from there.
Its age is a blank, and unusually the register says so outright. The Dutch national register normally gives at least a planting decade; for this tree it records leeftijd onbekend, age unknown, and marks the entry as less certain than most. So there is no number on this page and we are not going to invent one.
What is dated is the ground under it. The Protestant cemetery has been at Molenstraat 70a since 1865, and the parish that runs it opens the gates from sunrise to sunset, free, every day. It is a separate burial ground from the general cemetery at number 72 a few paces along the same street, where the weeping beech and the silver maple on this page stand.
If anyone knows when this cypress was planted, that is the missing line.
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19
The Oak of Kasteel Croy
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 170 years · Aarle-Rixtel (Laarbeek), about 3 km east of Helmond centre, bordering the municipality
Kasteel Croy is not open to you. This oak is.
The castle is a moated house whose oldest parts go back to the mid fifteenth century, now privately run, with offices and a bed and breakfast in its gatehouse, and not generally open to visitors. The oak stands outside all of that, beside Croylaan, the public road leading up to it. The national register of monumental trees lists this tree as council property, visitable and visible, so you can walk to it and stand under it without asking anybody's permission.
Its age comes from the register rather than from a planting record: a band of 1850 to 1860, which makes it roughly 170 years old. Our second source is honest but general, a description of the estate's garden and its century-old trees that never singles out this one, so read the date as the register's best estimate rather than a settled fact.
If the band is right, the oak went in while the Van der Brugghen family still held Croy, and it has spent its life on a boundary that kept moving around it. Stiphout belonged to the Croy estate until 1968, when it was absorbed into Helmond. The castle went the other way, into the municipality of Laarbeek. The oak stayed where it was, three kilometres east of a city it has never been part of.
Nobody has taped its trunk. If you do, tell us.
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20
The Copper Beech of the Sint Lucia Churchyard
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · about 140 years, planted 1880-1890 · Mierlo-Hout
The present church is younger than the trees standing behind it. Sint-Luciakerk was finished in 1896; the national register of monumental trees puts this pair of copper beeches in the ground between 1880 and 1890, which makes them roughly a hundred and forty years old.
There are two of them, recorded as a single entry, standing together in the kerkhof behind the church and both left in their natural form rather than pruned or shaped. The purple is not something a breeder designed. It is a pigment fault that turns up now and then in an ordinary green beech, and nurseries have been grafting that accident ever since.
Mierlo-Hout became a parish in its own right on 1 September 1884, and the church, the presbytery and the burial ground went up in stages between 1856 and the 1920s. Whether these two beeches were planted as part of that work is not written down anywhere. The register dates them; the parish histories that describe the building never mention the trees at all.
Nobody has measured the trunks either, which for a beech of this age is the one number worth having. The kerkhof is a working Catholic burial ground, open from sunrise to sunset, and Helmond 't Hout station is across the road. If you bring a tape, tell us what it reads.
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