The Dikke Boom of Verwolde

In 1767 a miller offered the van der Borch family 275 guilders for the right to cut two millstone axles from this oak's trunk. They refused, and the tree they saved is now widely reported as the largest solitary pedunculate oak in the Netherlands. Estimates put its age between 400 and 500 years, consistent with the estate's own planting records, and its girth at close to eight metres, though no source gives an exact figure, so this page records it as an approximate 780 centimetres rather than a precise one. It was named Tree of Gelderland in 2018, and the estate itself calls it the Jewel of Verwolde. It has needed help along the way. Decades of fertiliser draining in from an adjacent maize field damaged roots on its southern side, and a 2005 restoration programme, groundwater monitoring, compost and mycorrhiza treatment, lime dressing, addressed the dieback. That is a record of active care rather than a tree in current trouble. The estate built a dedicated hardened path to it, the Dikke Boompad, signposted in yellow and black and built to be reachable for visitors with mobility limitations, because enough people wanted to see the country's biggest oak that a proper route made more sense than a walk through the grass.