Jan Wolkers's Oak

Jan Wolkers had a favourite tree, and the national register of monumental trees names it: this pedunculate oak at the water's edge in Oegstgeest, the village where the writer was born. The register adds that it turns up again and again in his books. It stands on a boundary. On one side is the ground of the IJsclub Oegstgeest, the village ice club; on the other, the Oud Poelgeest estate, which played a large part in Wolkers's youth. In the last years of the German occupation the teenage Wolkers wandered those woods with a sketchbook and a paint box, and the sketchbook survives. How old the oak is depends on whom you ask. The register dates its planting to the 1890s, then says in the same entry that old photographs point to the early nineteenth century. The Bomenstichting, which keeps that register, has put it between 1800 and 1850, and the municipality calls it more than 120 years old. Somewhere between about 125 and 225 years, then, with the photographs arguing for the older end. What can be checked is the trunk: 4.67 metres round, on a tree about 15 metres tall. The estate behind it has a tree pedigree of its own. Herman Boerhaave, the Leiden physician who ran the Hortus Botanicus, bought Oud Poelgeest in 1724 and planted trees there because his garden in town had run out of room. The oak stands outside the estate, on municipal ground, a twenty minute walk from Leiden Centraal.