The Endegeest Linden

For eighty years nobody around Leiden was allowed a tall tree. During the Eighty Years' War the land outside the city had to stay open as a field of fire, and the national register says this linden went into the ground in front of Kasteel Endegeest straight after the war ended in 1648. That would make it, in the register's words, one of the oldest lindens in the Netherlands. The date has had a second look. A 2023 article in the tree journal Arbor Vitae points out that 1648 is precise, repeated from website to website, and backed by no source anyone has found; the tree did not even make a 1989 list of the country's large lindens. So: planted some time in the 1600s by the register's own band, between 300 and 400 years ago, with the exact year a tradition rather than a record. Nobody disputes the trunk. Measurements run from 5.58 to 5.70 metres round, on a tree about 20 metres tall that stands on its own in the green before the castle, with room on every side. It has watched the house change hands. The castle was rebuilt around 1650 for Elisabeth van Schouwen and Jacob van Berchem, passed to the city of Leiden in 1895, spent a long stretch as a place of mental health care, and has recently gone back into private hands. A public walking route still loops around the castle and past the linden.