The Giant Sequoias of Tongerseweg

Some of the honour squares in Maastricht's oldest surviving cemetery were planted not with the usual yews or cypresses but with giant sequoias, a species native to a single mountain range in California and almost never found in a 19th-century Dutch burial ground. The cemetery itself has taken Maastricht's dead since 1812, making it one of the oldest municipal cemeteries in the Netherlands, and its brick chapel and the towering sequoias are what most visitors remember. The largest measures 6.85 metres around and 36.6 metres tall, roughly 150 years old, among the thickest specimens of its kind recorded anywhere in the country, though no longer the tallest: other Dutch sequoias have since overtaken it in height while it kept adding girth instead. Planting a species built to eventually reach 90 metres and outlive the Roman Empire in a graveyard designed for individual human memory is its own quiet statement, whether or not the 19th-century planners intended it that way. The cemetery, now a national heritage monument holding more than a thousand trees in total, remains open to visitors during normal hours, sequoias included.