Five of these forty-one 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 oldest, and the one to see first, is a copper beech by the Westerkerk that the register says will eventually have to come down.
0 of 34 visited in Leeuwarden
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 195-205 years · 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.
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 225-275 years · 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.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · 175-185 years · 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.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 175-185 years · 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.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · 155-165 years · 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.
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · 145-155 years · 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.
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · 145-155 years · 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.
Wych Elm 'Exoniensis' (Ulmus glabra 'Exoniensis') · 90-95 years · Molenstraat, near the city centre
The graft on this street elm has swollen into a collar of scar tissue with a circumference of more than five metres, wider at that single point than the trunk of almost anything else on this list.
Two feather elms, a narrow, upright cultivar of wych elm, stand about ten metres apart in an ordinary two by two metre planting pit on a residential street. Both were grafted roughly 1.5 metres above the ground when they were planted, a standard way to propagate this cultivar, and in the ninety-odd years since, the graft union on the larger of the two has ballooned far beyond the trunk it sits on.
An oak fern has taken root in the crown of that same tree, an epiphyte quietly living in the canopy of a street planting that most passersby probably read as unremarkable. The Dutch national register of monumental trees lists the pair under its dendrological category: official recognition for two elms that most of Molenstraat likely walks past without a second look.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 185 years · Front/side garden of Poptaslot, a 17th-century almshouse estate near Leeuwarden, about 4km from Leeuwarden's published lee_003
Left to itself, this horse chestnut would surround itself with children. Its lowest branches sweep down to the grass and will root wherever they rest, throwing up a ring of new stems around the parent trunk. The gardener at Poptaslot cuts them back so the tree stays one tree.
It was planted in 1840 by L.P. Roodbaard, the landscape architect who redrew country estate after country estate across Friesland in the loose English style, as part of his design for the grounds here. Three maples nearby are his too, the same year, the same job. Poptaslot, also called Heringastate, was already a seventeenth century almshouse estate when he arrived, so the chestnut has spent its whole life as the newest thing on old ground.
The trunk is 4.75 metres round and the tree is 19 metres tall. In June 2017 the national tree foundation put it first on its list of the ten most beautiful trees in Friesland, ahead of older and larger trees. Not the oldest, not the biggest, just the one people wanted to stand under.
The garden is free, on weekdays from April to September, roughly nine to four and later in high summer, closed on Sundays. Going inside the house is a guided tour and a separate arrangement, but the tree is in the garden and the garden is the free part.
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · 128 years · City centre
Most commemorative trees get a plaque. This one got a fence carrying the state sword, the sceptre and the orb.
The lime went into the Raadhuisplein in 1898, the year Wilhelmina took the throne at eighteen, and the city set the architect Hendrik Kramer to work on the ironwork around its bed. Gates face each street that meets the square. Crowned letter W's and halberds stand along the rails, with orange twigs, blossom and apples worked into the metal between them. It is a great deal of blacksmithing for one lime, and it tells you precisely how a small provincial capital felt about its new queen.
A tinted postcard from around 1910 shows the result a decade in: a young tree inside a fence that already looks the more permanent of the two. The fence has not changed since. The tree has had a century and a quarter to catch up.
The date holds up from two directions. The city's own monumental-green walking route puts the planting at 1898, and the national register separately lists a Hollandse linde at this coordinate with a planting band of 1890 to 1900.
Fifty years later Leeuwarden planted a second royal lime a few hundred metres north, for Wilhelmina's daughter Juliana. Both are still standing.
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · 78 years · City centre
Leeuwarden's official list of its ten most special trees includes one that people now living watched go into the ground.
A photograph from 1948 shows alderman M.H. Geerts with a spade in front of the double gateway of the Boshuisen Gasthuis. The lime he is planting is still there, in the same rectangular bed in the north-west corner of the Jacobijnerkerkhof, and it carries the name of Princess Juliana. The country was three years out of the German occupation. The city planted a tree for the heir to the throne and had the alderman photographed doing it.
At 78 it is young for a register that mostly deals in centuries, and the national register does carry it: a Hollandse linde at this coordinate, planting band 1940 to 1950, which is about as close to a countersignature on the 1948 date as a register gets.
Behind it stands the gateway of the Boshuisen Gasthuis, an almshouse founded in 1652 by Anna van Eysinga, which makes the lime by nearly three centuries the newest thing on the corner. The Jacobijnerkerk takes up the rest of the square.
Two limes, two queens, fifty years and a few hundred metres apart, and both still standing.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 120-127 years · Noordersingel / Vliet area
This chestnut made the city's top ten on the strength of one branch.
The monumental-green walking route that the gemeente publishes with the Historisch Centrum names ten trees as Leeuwarden's most special, and the entry for this one turns almost entirely on a single zware gesteltak: a heavy, low main limb that leaves the trunk and reaches out over the footpath. You meet it on the far side of the Stedelijk Gymnasium, on the stretch of the Noorderweg between the Noorderbrug and the flower shop Blomke fan Romke.
The two sources do not quite agree on when it went in. The brochure says 1899. The national register, which carries it as a witte paardenkastanje by the Noorderbrug, gives a planting band of 1900 to 1910. The disagreement is a year or so wide and settles nothing important: this is a tree from the turn of the twentieth century, so somewhere between 116 and 127 years old.
It has been putting that limb out over the path for longer than anyone now walking under it has been alive, through two wars, the arrival of the cars and every set of schoolchildren the gymnasium has sent past.
In May the crown goes up in white candles, the low limb included, which is the week to look at the branch that got it listed.
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 116-126 years · Stationsplein
Step off the train at Leeuwarden and the first old tree you meet is the wrong plane.
Almost every plane on a Dutch square is a London plane, the hybrid bred for city air and planted by the thousand. This one is the parent species, an Oriental plane, which is rare this far north and which the national register carries under its Dutch name, oosterse plataan, at the Stationsplein.
It has held the open ground in front of the station since about 1900. Both sources that carry it agree: the city's own list of its ten most special trees dates it circa 1900, and the register gives a planting band of 1900 to 1910, so it is somewhere between 116 and 126 years old. The crown has spread the way planes on open squares do, low and wide over the paving, with the station front behind it.
Which means every arrival in this city by rail for more than a century has walked past it, most of them watching the clock rather than the tree. It stood there through the war and through the century of traffic that has crossed this square since.
Nobody has taped its girth. If you have a tape measure and a few minutes between trains, tell us.
Sycamore 'Leopoldii' (Acer pseudoplatanus 'Leopoldii') · 122 years · Rengerspark
The park gate carries 1904 in its ironwork, and so, near enough, does the tree standing just inside it.
Rengerspark was a private gift. In 1902 the former mayor W.J. van Welderen baron Rengers and his wife handed the ground to the city, Hendrik Copijn laid it out, and it opened in 1904 with more than fifty labelled tree species in it. A few steps inside the entrance on the Spanjaardslaan stands a sycamore of the cultivar 'Leopoldii', which the city's list of its ten most special trees names outright and dates to that opening year. The national register agrees within a decade: a bontbladige esdoorn on the south side of the park, planting band 1900 to 1910.
Spring is when the cultivar earns its place. The new leaves come out mottled pink, cream and green rather than plain green, as though somebody had been careless with the paint, and they hold that colouring for weeks before darkening. Nothing about it is accidental. Somebody choosing the trees for a brand new park in 1904 wanted a maple that would do this at the gate, and 122 years later it still does.
The park became a rijksmonument in 2001, which put Copijn's layout under protection. The maple has stood through the whole of it, and through the two wars that came in between.
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 160 years · Willemskade
For most of its life this beech was half of something else.
Two copper beeches went into the garden at Willemskade 27 around 1865, close enough together that over the decades they grew into and through one another. The IVN's walking guide to Leeuwarden's monumental trees calls them relatiebomen and still describes a pair. That guide has been overtaken. The national register's own history for the entry records that the southern tree was felled in 2026 after a fungus weakened its base, a problem first written up at an inspection in 2023. The northern beech is the one left standing, and it is the one on this page.
It was in the ground before the house was. The villa behind it, now a listed building, went up in 1874; the register gives the trees a planting band of 1860 to 1870 and the IVN says circa 1865, which puts this one at roughly 160 years old. The municipality designated it and entered it in the national register in 1988.
You look at it from the pavement. It stands along the garden boundary facing the Willemskade, on private ground with a public view, which is how the waterfront has seen it for a century and a half. In late April the new leaves open translucent red before they darken, and for a fortnight the whole crown holds the light.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 120 years · Vosseparkwijk
An ice storm in March 1987 damaged this wingnut badly enough that the scar is still visible behind an old branch, and decades on it is one of two enormous trees flanking the path where Vosseparkje opens onto Molenstraat.
The Caucasian wingnut is native to forests around the Caspian Sea, thousands of kilometres from Friesland. Leeuwarden's own specimen has grown a trunk 130 centimetres round, a figure the national tree register does not even record: it comes from a walking-tour pamphlet published by the city's own historical centre, which found the tree standing beside a second, gold-leaved companion nobody has identified yet.
The park itself dates to 1872, laid out by garden architect Gerrit Vlaskamp around a drinking-water reservoir the city needed more than it needed a park, and the wingnut went in a generation later, sometime between 1900 and 1910. It has outlived the reservoir's original purpose, the ice storm, and watched the technical school built beside the park in 1936 grow old itself.
Two sources place it slightly differently, one at the Molenstraat path junction and one on the park's west side, close enough that this reads as one tree rather than two, but worth a second look on the ground.
Grey Poplar (Populus x canescens) · 117 years · Vosseparkwijk
A Historisch Centrum Leeuwarden walking brochure and the national tree register agree down to the year: this grey poplar on the east side of Vosseparkje's pond went into the ground in 1909, one of the exotic and unusual trees the brochure singles out on a route otherwise lined with white and red horse chestnuts.
It survived the storm of 1970 that flattened trees across the Netherlands and remains, in the register's own words, healthy and structurally sound more than a century later. The species is a hybrid of white poplar and aspen, common enough as roadside planting but rarely old enough to earn a place in a national monumental-trees register.
It stands on the pond's east bank in Westerpark, known locally as Vosseparkje, alongside a leaning white acacia the same brochure records as propped up nearby, and, on the park's far side, a Caucasian wingnut with a trunk more than a metre round. Together they form the park's own cluster of registered trees, a short walk from the Prinsentuin and Princessehof gardens where most of Leeuwarden's other old trees stand.
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 120 years · City centre
The plane tree in front of Leeuwarden's former stock exchange spent years hemmed in by brick paving before the city dug it back out in 2005 and built a proper rooting structure around the trunk. Inspectors called its condition merely adequate for years afterward; by 2022 they wrote that it was clearly thriving.
The Beursgebouw behind it went up in 1880 for the city's grain and commodity traders and now houses part of the University of Groningen's Campus Fryslan. The tree came a generation later, planted sometime between 1900 and 1910 on what was then a green strip beside the building. A local nature guide's walking route singles it out for the fountain beside it and for the spiky seed balls the species drops each year.
It is not Leeuwarden's only oriental plane. A second one, planted around the same years, stands 800 metres away in front of the railway station. This one is the one with the fountain and the old trading floor at its back, on Wirdumerdijk, in the middle of the old town rather than at its edge.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 135-145 years · Transvaalwijk
The register does not soften it: the thicker of these two chestnuts has a cavity with a fungal infection and a strong case of bleeding canker, and the condition of both is rated moderate.
They are still standing, and they have been standing a while. Both went into the garden of the Diakonessenhuis when the hospital was founded in 1879, or within the decade after it, which puts them at roughly 135 to 145 years. They were entered in the national monumental-trees register in 1989. Between those two dates the hospital closed, its wards became apartments, and the building work of the 1990s dug a garage entrance in beside them.
Bleeding canker is the bacterial disease that has been working through Europe's horse chestnuts since the early 2000s, leaving dark sticky streaks down the bark. Trees carry it for years, and some of them come back from it. Neither the register nor anyone else has written these two off.
So this is a pair to see now rather than eventually, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about a tree that predates every building around it. They stand about 30 metres east of the courtyard's pink-flowering red chestnut, in a garden laid out in 1895 to a Vlaskamp design and kept, in part, through everything that has happened to this site since.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 135-145 years · Transvaalwijk
London planes were the tree Victorian cities planted when they wanted something that could stand the air, and they manage it by shedding their bark in plates, taking the grime off with it.
This one is the northernmost of the three registered trees in the old Diakonessenhuis garden and the closest to the hospital building itself, which means it has had the best view of everything that happened here. The hospital opened in 1879. The plane went into the ground between 1880 and 1890, so it is roughly 135 to 145 years old. The hospital closed in 1987, the building came through the years as a national monument and now holds flats, and the plane was entered in the monumental-trees register in 1989, in the middle of the conversion.
Like the chestnuts beside it, it took damage from the building work of the 1990s, when a garage entrance went in next to the neighbouring block. Inspectors rated its condition reasonable in 2017.
The register is divided about this courtyard in an odd way. The two chestnuts are listed as privately owned and openly visitable, while the plane is down to a public body with its visitability marked unknown. On the ground it is one landscaped garden with paved paths running through it and a bench beside the trees, laid out in 1895 to a Vlaskamp design and half surviving.
Crimean Linden (Tilia x euchlora) · 70-75 years · Binnenstad
You walk past this lime to get into the public library, and you do it through the gate of the old prison.
The Blokhuispoort is Leeuwarden's jail, brick wings and barred windows, out of that use and now holding the library, a cultural venue and shops. The Crimean lime stands to the left of the entrance. The city's own monumental-green walking route dates it to 1954 and counts it among the ten trees it considers Leeuwarden's most remarkable, which it manages while being younger than most of the trees it shares that list with.
Tilia x euchlora is not the lime you usually meet on a Dutch street. It is a hybrid with darker, glossier leaves than the common lime, and part of the reason planners choose it is that it spares the pavement below the sticky honeydew rain that falls from a common lime in summer. In front of a public building on a square full of terrace seating, that is not an accident.
One caution about the pin. The only source carrying this tree is the brochure, which places it left of the Blokhuispoort entrance, and our coordinate is the geocoded centre of Blokhuisplein rather than the trunk. Walk to the entrance and look left. If you find it, tell us exactly where it stands.
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · 118-122 years · Oud Oost
A cedar from the mountains of Lebanon has stood in front of a Frisian almshouse since the year the almshouse was finished.
The Gabbema Gasthuis on the Wijbrand de Geeststraat was completed in 1906 to a design by Willem Cornelis de Groot, in the mixed Art Nouveau and neo-Renaissance manner of that moment, and the city's monumental-green walking route dates the cedar to the same year. It counts the tree among the ten it considers Leeuwarden's most remarkable.
Two honest notes before you go. Our coordinate is a geocode of the almshouse building rather than of the trunk, so it is good to about forty metres. And the tree stands in front of the gasthuis rather than inside it. The gate at that point is marked as one pedestrians may use, but nobody has stated in so many words that the grounds are open, so plan on seeing it from the street and treat anything more as a bonus.
From the pavement it is unmistakable anyway. Cedrus libani holds its branches out in flat, layered tiers, a shape no Dutch street tree has, and it keeps its dark needles through the winter when everything around it is bare. At about 120 years it is barely started. The trees this species is famous for, on the Lebanese mountainsides, are counted in centuries rather than decades.
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · 100-104 years · Vosseparkwijk
Leeuwarden's own walking brochure does not lead on this tree's species. It calls it the leaning, propped-up acacia, and it mentions it twice.
The tree is a black locust, white acacia in Dutch, planted in 1924 in Westerpark, the small park at the west edge of the old town that everybody here calls the Vosseparkje. It has spent a century going over sideways and is now carried by a support. That is less alarming than it sounds. Black locusts lean: the timber is famously hard and rot-resistant, the crowns grow heavy and lopsided, and old ones tilt. Nobody has published a verdict on how much longer it has, and it would be wrong to guess in either direction.
The park around it was laid out in 1872 around a drinking-water reservoir the city needed rather more than it needed a park, and the acacia arrived half a century after that. Its neighbours are worth the extra five minutes: a grey poplar planted in 1909 on the east bank of the pond, and across the park a Caucasian wingnut from the Caspian forests with a trunk over a metre round.
Our pin is a park-edge approximation taken from Westersingel 8. The tree itself stands inside the park, and it is the one you cannot mistake.
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · Binnenstad
In a breeze this tree changes colour. A silver lime carries dark green leaves that are covered underneath in white felt, so a gust turns the whole crown pale for a second and then back again.
That is exactly why the local IVN nature volunteers put it on their monumental-trees walk through the city. The felt is the field mark that separates Tilia tomentosa from the common lime lining half the streets in this country, including Leeuwarden's own two royal limes, one on the Raadhuisplein and one on the Jacobijnerkerkhof. This is not one of those. It is a southeast European tree, from the Balkans and Anatolia, planted in northern cities because it copes with hard ground and dry summers better than the native limes do.
It stands on the Druifstreek, opposite the Blokhuispoort, on a stretch of the old centre people walk without looking up. The same IVN walk names a second silver lime a few hundred metres north on the Eewal, so once you have learned the leaf you can collect the pair in ten minutes.
Nobody has dated this one. No register carries it, no source gives a planting year, and nobody has taped the trunk. If you know when it went in, or you have a tape measure and thirty seconds, tell us.
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · Binnenstad
Silver limes flower in July, when most other nectar in a Dutch city is finished, and it is common to find dead and dying bumblebees on the ground beneath one. For a century the tree's nectar was blamed for poisoning them. The explanation now generally preferred is simpler and sadder: this is the last thing in flower, worn-out bees come to it late, and by then there is not enough in it to save them.
This is one of two silver limes the local IVN nature volunteers put on their monumental-trees walk through Leeuwarden. It stands on the Eewal, opposite Restaurant Spinoza at number 50, in the old centre. The other is a few hundred metres south on the Druifstreek. Both are Tilia tomentosa rather than the common lime of most Dutch streets, and the way to tell is to turn a leaf over: white felt underneath, dark green above.
Nobody has dated this one either. It appears in no national register and no source gives a planting year. If you know when it went in, tell us.
Two independent geocodes for this address agree within about fifteen metres, so the pin will put you on the right frontage rather than at the exact trunk.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 135-145 years · Binnenstad
This chestnut spent most of its life outside a prison and now stands outside a library.
The Blokhuispoort started as a fifteenth-century citadel, the blokhuis the name comes from, and became the Huis van Bewaring, the city house of detention. Its cell wing went up between 1892 and 1894. The register dates the chestnut to somewhere between 1880 and 1890, so it was in the ground before the masons arrived, and it kept its corner while the cells filled and emptied for the better part of a century. The doors are open now. The complex holds the public library, workspaces and shops, and the walls are one of the few places in Leeuwarden where you can read a book where people once were not allowed to leave.
Inspectors found sulphur tuft at the foot of the trunk, a white-rot fungus, at a check around 2017. They rated the tree good anyway and concluded it can safely stay. The ground has been less generous than the inspectors: the register notes that the growing space has increasingly gone over to parked cars, leaving a thin green strip on the canal side.
About a hundred and forty years of that, and it still drops conkers every autumn. Only the register has written this one up, so if you know more of its story, tell us.
Turkey Oak (Quercus cerris) · 116-126 years · Rengerspark
The national register calls this one of the heaviest Turkey oaks in the Netherlands, and then declines to say how thick it is. No girth, no height. Just the claim, and a note that the tree is healthy, fast growing and unusually stable in its structure.
The Dutch name for the species is moseik, moss oak, and it comes from the acorns. Every cup is covered in long whiskery scales that make it look mossed over, which is the one thing that separates a Turkey oak from the ordinary oaks of a Dutch park at ten paces. The register lists this tree under that name and nothing else, leaving the species column empty: Moseik Rengerspark.
The dates line up with the park around it. The Rengers family gave the ground to the city in 1902, Hendrik Copijn laid it out, and it opened in 1906. The register puts the oak planting between 1900 and 1910, so it has been here for as long as anyone has been allowed to walk through. The park itself has been a national monument since 2001, which is a rare thing for a piece of landscaping and tells you the design was worth protecting.
One person with a tape measure could settle the heaviest claim in a minute. Nobody has yet. If you do it, send us the number.
Wych Elm 'Exoniensis' (Ulmus glabra 'Exoniensis') · 116-126 years · Vosseparkwijk
The park this elm stands in was laid out around the city's drinking water. In 1872 Gerrit Vlaskamp landscaped the grounds of a water reservoir on the west side of Leeuwarden, and the Vosseparkje is what became of it. The reservoir came first and the park followed. It was redesigned in 1926, by which point the elm was long in place: the register dates its planting to between 1900 and 1910.
Old elms are not a common sight in this country. Disease took most of them over the last century, which is reason enough to walk over to one that is 120 years old and still standing. This is a feather elm, pluimiep in Dutch, a cultivar that takes its name in both languages from the shape of the crown, upright and narrow where a common elm spreads wide.
The register's description of it runs to nine words: a fine feather elm on the north side of the park. That is the whole written record. The historical centre's walking tour of the Vosseparkwijk passes the park without naming it, and so does the city's monumental green route. Whatever else is known about this tree sits in somebody's memory rather than in an archive, and we would like to hear it.
A second feather elm of the same cultivar stands at the far end of the park, by the pond.
Wych Elm 'Exoniensis' (Ulmus glabra 'Exoniensis') · 116-126 years · Vosseparkwijk
The national register says nothing about how big this elm is and rather a lot about where it stands: it has a fine spot by the pond. That is the entry, more or less in full. State inventories do not usually pay compliments to a view.
The Vosseparkje is small, a few minutes end to end, and seven of the trees in it are on that register. A Caucasian wingnut, a grey poplar, a leaning black locust, a Canadian poplar, an oak nobody has pinned to a species, and two feather elms of the same cultivar. This is the one by the water. Its counterpart stands about 250 metres off at the north-west end, which makes the pond the thing that tells them apart.
The ground was landscaped in 1872 by Gerrit Vlaskamp, around a reservoir built to hold the city's drinking water, and redrawn in 1926. The register dates this elm to between 1900 and 1910, so it was already standing when the 1926 plan was drawn and it is older than the park's present shape.
Nobody has written it up beyond the register. Two walking routes cover this neighbourhood, one from the city's historical centre and one following its monumental trees, and neither of them names the elm at the pond.
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · 185-195 years · City centre
One of these two limes carries a cavity in its trunk the shape of a letterbox.
They stand as a matched pair in front of the Liauckama House on the Grote Kerkstraat, and both are pollards: trees cut back to the same points, over and over. A tree answers that treatment by thickening the cut ends into knuckles and throwing a burst of young shoots off the top of them, so a pollard lime ends up short, heavy and knobbled where a free-grown lime would be tall and even. The knuckles are the tally of every cut.
The building behind them is much older. The Liauckama House goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century, possibly 1580, and is now part of Museum Princessehof. The trees came far later, and the national register cannot quite decide when. Its planting band puts them at 1830 to 1840, while its own history text for this pair says they have probably stood on this spot for over two hundred years. The two readings sit a good half-century apart, and both of them are the register's.
The register calls this a striking place for a tree to stand, and rates both of them fair to reasonable in condition. Nobody else has written them up, so if you know more, tell us.
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 156-166 years · City centre
This copper beech used to have a twin. Look at the other side of the front garden and you will find a ginkgo.
The Nieuw Sint Anthony Gasthuis was built between 1862 and 1864 to a design by F. Stoett, and two copper beeches went into its front garden, one on each side, each mirroring the other. The national register puts their planting somewhere between 1860 and 1870 and suspects, without stating it as fact, that they arrived with the building itself. That would make this one around 160 years old.
The western tree lost. A wound opened in its trunk, a fungus nobody identified got into it, and it declined quickly. When inspectors came back in 2017 they found it had been felled and a ginkgo planted where it had stood. Symmetry is a hard thing to hold on to for a century and a half.
The eastern tree is the one still standing, and it has been looked after. The Bomenstichting made it their adoption tree in 1987, and the register still describes it as in good condition. Look down at the base of the trunk: the boundary fence has been cut and reshaped around the tree rather than the other way round.
The register carries no measurement of the trunk, and only one coordinate for what were once two trees, so the pin marks the garden rather than the beech.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · 116-126 years · Noordersingel, across from the Prinsentuin
These two beeches were dated by a photograph. In a picture of the almshouse taken in 1904 they are saplings, thin enough to be easy to miss.
That photograph is most of the evidence for their age, and the national register says so plainly. It reads the picture, puts the planting somewhere between 1900 and 1910, and leaves the question there. It also notes what the image makes obvious: the two were set deliberately in mirror image, one on each side of the building, the way an institution used to announce itself.
The institution is far older than either the trees or the house they stand against. The Marcelis Goverts Gasthuis was founded in 1658 by Marcelis Goverts and Mayke Marcus for Leeuwarden's Mennonite congregation, and it moved to the Noordersingel in 1877 into a Neo-Renaissance building by the architect H.R. Stoett. The beeches came a generation after that.
The most dangerous thing to happen to them since went on underground. In 1994 sewer works were dug close by, the kind of job that quietly kills a mature tree by taking out its roots, and both came through it. Inspected in 2017, both were in good leaf with nothing wrong at the base of the trunk.
Neither trunk has been measured, and the register is the only source that mentions the trees at all. They stand directly across the Noordersingel from the Prinsentuin, which puts them on the same short walk.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 166-176 years · Vlietzone
The register gives this cemetery two separate plane entries, and they stand half a kilometre apart inside the same walled ground.
This is the second of them: a pair of planes on the path between sections two and four, with a planting band of 1850 to 1860. The oldest trees here date from around 1830, so these two arrived a good twenty years into the cemetery's working life, when the ground they shade had already been filling for a generation.
That ground was laid out in 1833 to a design by Lucas Pieters Roodbaard, who also drew the Prinsentuin, which is why a burial ground reads here as a landscape garden with graves in it. Burials stopped long ago and the site became a national monument in 1967.
What it has become since is closer to a wood. Ivy has climbed most of the trunks. Grey herons nest in the crowns, colonially and noisily, and they start early enough in the year that the racket arrives before the leaves do.
The planes themselves do what planes do everywhere. The bark comes away in plates and leaves a mottle of cream, olive and grey underneath, which makes them the easiest trunks to pick out among all the ivy around them.
Neither of the two has been measured, and the register is the only source that records them. If you know more about this pair than a planting decade, tell us.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 116-126 years · Rengerspark
A large branch tore out of this tree and took much of the trunk with it. What is left stands as two halves, held by an anchor braced between them.
The national register is not alarmed by that. It calls this wingnut one of the heaviest of its species in the Netherlands and the undisputed champion of Friesland, reads the wound as an early entry into the veteran phase, and says the tree can safely carry on for at least another decade. It is being left to age and decay where it stands, deliberately, for the wildlife that a rotting tree of this size supports.
Rengerspark was a gift. The Rengers family handed the ground to Leeuwarden, Hendrik Copijn laid it out between 1902 and 1906, and the wingnut went in with that planting. In 2020 the municipality ran a public vote for the most beautiful tree in the district, and the big wingnut in Rengerspark was one of the ten on the ballot.
Late summer is its moment. Caucasian wingnut is a walnut relative from the Caucasus, and it fruits in long green strings of winged nutlets that hang off the branches like beads on a curtain.
For a champion it is strangely unmeasured: no girth, no height, no figure of any kind on record anywhere we can find. If you own a tape measure, we would like the number.