Five of these seven stand in the Prinsentuin, which has been an open public walking park for more than two hundred years and is one of the first in the Netherlands. It was laid out between 1822 and 1824 on the old northern ramparts by Lucas Pieters Roodbaard, the Frisian garden architect who also designed the city cemetery a few streets north, where herons now nest in the crowns of his plane trees. The seventh is the oldest and the one to see first: a copper beech by the Westerkerk that the register says will eventually have to come down.
0 of 7 visited in Leeuwarden
1
The Horse Chestnut of the Prinsentuin
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 195 to 205 years, from the register's planting band of 1820 to 1830 · Prinsentuin
This tree is almost exactly as old as the idea of a public park in this country.
Between 1822 and 1824 the city had a new garden laid out on the northern fortifications, in the existing grounds, by Lucas Pieters Roodbaard, the Frisian garden architect who spent his career converting Dutch formality into the romantic English manner: curved paths, water, planned views, no straight lines. It has been open to the public ever since, which makes the Prinsentuin one of the first public walking parks in the Netherlands and this chestnut one of the original plantings.
Two hundred years of people walking under a tree is not neutral. Horse chestnuts suffer badly from compacted ground and this one has had two centuries of feet. It is also the species now under attack across Europe from the leaf miner moth, which browns the foliage from July onward and makes a mature chestnut look half dead by August without actually killing it.
So come in May, when it is at its unarguable best: white candles held upright all over the crown, in a park laid out by a man who would have chosen it for exactly that.
It stands beside the Historisch Centrum, on the Groeneweg side.
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2
The Copper Beech of the Westerkerk
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 225 to 275 years, from the register's planting band of 1750 to 1800 · Centrum
The national register does not usually tell you a tree is going to die. About this one it does.
In the 1990s the ground it roots in was compacted, which for a beech is close to the worst thing that can be done to it: the fine feeding roots sit in the top half metre of soil and they need air in it. The tree took a blow it never came back from. The ground has since been improved and its condition has not recovered, and the register states plainly that it will in time have to be felled.
It is the oldest tree in Leeuwarden, banded 1750 to 1800, standing by a church whose history runs back to the fifteenth century and which has been reworked repeatedly for the different uses it has been put to.
There is nothing tragic to look at. A declining old beech is still an enormous dark thing on a city street, and the decline is mostly visible in what is missing: thinner cover at the top of the crown, more light coming through than there should be, dead ends on the upper branches.
This is the only tree on this site we would tell you to see sooner rather than later.
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3
The Beech at the Pier Pander Temple
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 175 to 185 years, from the register's planting band of 1840 to 1850 · Prinsentuin
There is a small classical temple in this park, built in 1924 to hold the work of one sculptor.
Pier Pander was born in Friesland in 1864, the son of a rag merchant, and got out through talent and patronage: Rome, a career in marble, and an early death in 1919. The temple was raised to his own plans five years later, a domed round building in a public park, to house his sculpture. There are not many Dutch artists with a temple.
The beech stands beside it. Its date is not certain: the register bands it 1840 to 1850 and notes that trees here could equally have gone in when the temple was built, but photographs from the 1930s argue for the earlier reading. This is the Noorderplantage, laid out in 1843 on the former Noorderdwinger bastion and joined to the Prinsentuin at its eastern end, and the register's general conclusion is that the oldest trees in it date from between 1830 and 1880.
A beech beside a domed white building is a deliberate effect: smooth grey bark against smooth stone, and in summer a canopy dense enough to put the whole temple in shade.
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4
The Plane of the Old City Cemetery
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 175 to 185 years, from the register's planting band of 1840 to 1850 · Vlietzone
Grey herons nest in the tops of these trees.
That is the first thing to know about the old city cemetery, and in February and March it is loud. Herons are colonial breeders, they choose tall trees near water, they start early in the year, and a heronry is not a quiet place: a large ragged nest per fork, birds arriving with sticks, and a noise like an argument in a shed. From below you mostly see the undersides and hear the rest.
The ground was laid out in 1833 to a design by Lucas Pieters Roodbaard, the same architect as the Prinsentuin, which is why a cemetery here reads like a landscape garden with graves in it. It went out of use long ago and is now a national monument. Ivy has taken many of the trunks.
The plane is on the path between sections two and three, banded 1840 to 1850, so from the earliest planting. London plane is the classic city tree because it sheds its bark in plates and with it the soot, which is why the trunk is a camouflage of cream, olive and grey.
Go in early spring, before the leaves, when you can see the birds.
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5
The Beech behind Tresoar
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Prinsentuin
It stands next to the building where Friesland keeps its memory.
Tresoar is the Frisian historical and literary centre, the archive of a language with its own literature and its own long argument about being a language. The beech is directly behind it, in the Prinsentuin, on the line of the old northern fortifications that the park was built on and that have been a national monument since 1967.
The register bands it 1860 to 1870, which places it a generation after Roodbaard's layout rather than in it, planted into a park that already existed.
Beech is the tree that makes a Dutch park feel like a wood. It casts the heaviest shade of any large tree here, dense enough that almost nothing grows under a mature one, so the ground beneath is bare orange leaf litter and roots. That is not neglect, it is the tree winning.
Run your hand over the trunk. Beech bark stays smooth and thin its whole life, which is why people carve it, and why an old one in a public park usually carries a century of initials that have stretched and blurred as the trunk widened.
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6
The Ash by the Tea House
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · roughly 145 to 155 years, from the register's planting band of 1870 to 1880 · Prinsentuin
The register calls this a very impressive specimen of the species and then adds, in the same breath, that its crown has developed one-sidedly because of the park trees standing next to it.
Both are true and the second explains the first. A tree that grows up hemmed in on one side puts everything it has into the open side, so you end up with an asymmetric crown reaching out over the path or the water, which reads as dramatic rather than damaged. Roodbaard's successors planted a park; the trees then negotiated among themselves.
It stands on the bank by the Theekoepel, the tea house, in the Noorderplantage end of the grounds, and the register bands it 1870 to 1880.
An ash of that age is worth stopping for now more than it was twenty years ago. Ash dieback, a fungal disease that arrived in the Netherlands in 2010, has killed a large share of the country's ash in the years since, and a tolerant mature tree is no longer an ordinary thing. A minority resist it, apparently on genetics rather than luck, and every big healthy one left is a candidate.
Black buds in winter, in opposite pairs. Nothing else here has them.
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7
The Marilandica Poplar
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · roughly 145 to 155 years, from the register's planting band of 1870 to 1880 · Prinsentuin
The trunk is the reason to come. It is deeply grooved and covered in burrs, hard woody swellings the size of fists and heads, which on a poplar of this age turn the bole into something closer to rock than bark.
Burrs are the tree's response to damage or infection: a knot of dormant buds that keeps growing without ever making a shoot, laying down wildly disordered grain. Woodturners prize the timber for exactly that and pay serious money for a burr this size. Standing on a public park bank by a city canal is the safest place it could be.
Marilandica is a named clone of the Canadian poplar, the hybrid of European black poplar and American cottonwood, selected and propagated by cuttings, which means every Marilandica anywhere is genetically the same tree. This one has been growing since the 1870s at the centre of the Prinsentuin by the Noorder Stadsgracht.
Poplars are planted for speed and taken out early because they get brittle. This one has been left, and a century and a half of being left is what produced the trunk.
Go and put your hands on it. That is the whole visit.
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