The Three Oldest Beeches of Stadspark

Stadspark's own marked walking route names these three beeches, standing together partway along the Jeker, as the oldest trees in a park that otherwise holds more than 1,400 of them. At around 160 years, they date to the park's main 19th-century expansion rather than to its far older origins: Stadspark traces its beginnings to a linden planting in 1648 and a formal walking path laid out from 1706, but none of those 17th and early 18th-century originals are known to have survived into the present, so these beeches, planted as the various sub-parks along the Jeker were laid out through the 1800s, are as far back as anyone can point with confidence today. The park itself is one of the oldest continuous city parks in the Netherlands, a 10-hectare green belt running along the Jeker and the old fortification walls, now home to roughly 800 trees across some 160 species from across the world, including a ginkgo, a tulip tree, silver limes and an American yellowwood elsewhere on the same route. The three beeches remain the route's own answer to the obvious question a visitor would ask first: which of all this is the oldest.