The Adoption Beech of the Sint Anthony Gasthuis
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.
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Getting there
Voortuin (front garden) of the Nieuw Sint Anthony Gasthuis, Perkswaltje, Leeuwarden
You can recognise it by the purple-black leaves, and by what stands opposite it: a ginkgo, planted where its twin was felled. It stands on the eastern side of the front garden of the Nieuw Sint Anthony Gasthuis.
Free to view from the almshouse's front garden/courtyard. The street it fronts, Perkswaltje, is a permissive pedestrian route rather than a fully public road (OSM tags it access=private, foot=permissive), consistent with the register's own visitable=ja. Not the same site as the Sint Anthony Gasthuis entries at Perkswaltje 11 already excluded from this project as private (a different part of the same almshouse complex, owner=stichting there vs owner=publiekrechtelijke organisatie here).
Central Leeuwarden, short walk from Leeuwarden Centraal station.
Autumn colour
late October into November, when the copper leaves turn
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
- In the official register: Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen (Bomenstichting), no. 1682926
- monumentalebomen.nl
- OpenStreetMap (queried 2026-09-10): the Nieuw Sint Anthonygasthuis building (wikidata Q15879818, rce heritage id 24160) fronts onto Perkswaltje, ta…
- services-eu1.arcgis.com