Ancient trees in the Netherlands

The Netherlands is the wrong country for ancient trees and has them anyway. This page maps 58 remarkable trees across 11 cities in the Netherlands, each one verified and placed. The oldest of them is The Juttepeer of Heilige Geesthofje in The Hague, at about 388 years.

Half of it was seabed, peat bog or open water within the last thousand years, the soil is young, the water table sits close under the roots, and North Sea storms arrive with nothing in the way to slow them down. What survived did so under shelter, and that shapes the entire list: a pear tree inside an almshouse courtyard, a cycad potted in a botanical garden in 1704 and never repotted since, lindens pollarded for three centuries because a village square needed its shade. Dutch ancient trees are tended survivors rather than forest giants, which is why so many stand behind a gate you have to find rather than out in open parkland. It also explains the oldest one on this list: a fruit tree.

Every mapped city in the Netherlands

Amsterdam10 trees · oldest 300 years 2

Leiden6 trees · oldest about 310 years 3Groningen5 trees · oldest about 340 years 4Maastricht5 trees · oldest about 300 years 5Nijmegen5 trees · oldest 275 years 6Rotterdam5 trees · oldest about 226 years 7

The Hague5 trees · oldest about 388 years 8

Utrecht5 trees · oldest about 275 years 9Arnhem4 trees · oldest ~370 years 10Breda4 trees · oldest 245 years 11Haarlem4 trees · oldest over 230 years

The oldest tree mapped in the Netherlands

The Juttepeer of Heilige Geesthofje about 388 years

Centrum, The Hague. Elderly women living in this almshouse have been making jelly from this pear tree's fruit since at least the 17th century, and the tree they are picking from is very likely the same one their predecessors used four centuries ago.

Trees from the Netherlands also appear in The Great Planes of Europe · The Oldest Tree in Every Country We Map. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.