What is the oldest tree in Nijmegen?

Very likely the beech circle of Sterrenbos in Park Brakkenstein, part of an 18th-century star-shaped forest, estimated at 250 to 300 years old.

Are Nijmegen's ancient trees free to visit?

Yes, all five are in public parks with free access.

Which Nijmegen tree created a plant variety sold in garden centres?

A ginkgo in Kronenburgerpark, whose witch's-broom branch mutation was grafted and registered in 1995 as the dwarf cultivar Ginkgo biloba 'Mariken'.

Netherlands

Ancient Trees in Nijmegen

Nijmegen calls itself the oldest city in the Netherlands, and its trees mostly agree with the claim in spirit if not in age: none predate the Romans, but nearly all of them grow on ground that does. A sycamore chosen tree of the year on a hilltop fort, a ginkgo that accidentally created a garden-centre plant variety, a star-shaped forest's surviving beech circle, a chestnut planted for a specific queen on a specific day, and a Californian giant in a railway workers' park. All five cost nothing to visit.

The Sycamore of Valkhofpark

Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · 145 years · Benedenstad

Nijmegen's most recent Tree of the Year grows on ground that has been fought over since the Romans. Valkhofpark sits on the Valkhof hill, site of a Roman legionary camp and later Charlemagne's imperial palace, and in 2021 neighbourhood residents voted this sycamore, planted around 1880, the year's outstanding tree. It stands roughly 23 metres tall with a trunk just under four metres around, respectable rather than record-breaking, in a park whose ruins date back two thousand years. What makes it the park's chosen tree is not age relative to the site, since the Roman camp beneath it long predates any living thing above ground, but presence: it is the sycamore visitors actually notice among the park's mix of younger plantings and older ruins, singled out for a vote most Dutch neighbourhoods hold every year for a genuinely ordinary species elevated by a genuinely extraordinary setting. Valkhofpark itself is a national monument, one of the oldest continuously used defensive and residential sites in the country, its two surviving medieval structures, the Barbarossa ruin and the Nicholas Chapel, predating the tree by roughly seven centuries. Free to enter and in the middle of the city, it turns a Roman hilltop into an ordinary place to sit under a tree.

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The Mother Ginkgo of Kronenburgerpark

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · 95 years · City centre

One ginkgo in a Nijmegen park quietly created a plant variety now sold across Europe. Sometime around 1930 a tree took root in Kronenburgerpark, laid out in 1881 and 1882 just outside the old city walls, and decades later a nurseryman noticed one of its branches growing in a strange, compact, witch's-broom tangle unlike the rest of the tree. Grafted, propagated and registered in 1995, that mutation became Ginkgo biloba 'Mariken', a dwarf ornamental cultivar now sold by nurseries well beyond the Netherlands and later awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, named after Mariken van Nieumeghen, the 16th-century Dutch morality play about a Nijmegen woman who makes a pact with the devil. The original tree that produced it is still standing in the park today, roughly 95 years old and about 2.85 metres around, ordinary in form itself even as its genetic accident spread to gardens it will never see. Ginkgo is a living fossil, a lineage that predates flowering plants by tens of millions of years and survived almost unchanged, which makes this park's real contribution almost funny: not the tree's age, but one freak branch that turned into a garden-centre product. Kronenburgerpark is free, central and a national monument in its own right, landscaped around what had recently been the city's demolished fortifications.

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The Beech Circle of Sterrenbos

European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · 275 years · Brakkenstein

Nijmegen's oldest tree does not stand on a battlefield or beside a museum. It stands in a star. Sterrenbos, a star-shaped pattern of radiating forest avenues laid out on the Brakkenstein estate in the 18th century, still survives inside what is now Park Brakkenstein, and a circle of beeches planted as part of that original scheme is, according to local historians, the oldest living tree stock inside city limits, estimated at 250 to 300 years old. Not every original beech has made it this far. Some in the ring have died of old age over the past three centuries and the surviving trees now stand with visible gaps between them, which is itself part of the honest story: this is a living remnant of a planting scheme, not a complete, restored set. The star pattern of avenues around the circle predates the park as a public space by roughly two centuries, laid out when Brakkenstein was still a private country estate first documented in 1654, decades before the beeches themselves went in. What remains today is free and open, part of a park wedged between Radboud University's campus and a rail line in the south of the city, and it is the closest thing this city has to a tree that watched its own park being invented around it.

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The Julianaboom

Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 78 years · Altrade

This chestnut has a birthday on record: 4 September 1948, the day Juliana became Queen of the Netherlands after her mother Wilhelmina's abdication. Nijmegen marked the occasion by planting a white horse chestnut in what is now Julianapark, a former cemetery ground in the Altrade neighbourhood turned public park and named for the new queen. It is an ordinary species grown into an unusually well-documented individual, its planting date tied to a specific historical event rather than estimated from growth rings or a park's founding year, the kind of precision most trees on this list do not have. Horse chestnuts are not native to the Netherlands, brought west from the Balkans in the 16th century and adopted so thoroughly into Dutch parks and streets that most residents assume they always belonged. This one has outlived the queen it was planted for by more than two decades, and the country it grew up in has changed monarchs twice since. Julianapark itself is small, free and largely residential in character, a quiet green space east of the city centre with none of Valkhofpark's Roman weight or Kronenburgerpark's fortress history, just one dated tree doing what a planted anniversary tree is supposed to do: mark a date and keep growing past it.

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The Giant Sequoia of Krayenhoffpark

Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · 100 years · Biezen

A Californian giant grows in one of Nijmegen's smallest parks, in a neighbourhood built for railway employees. Krayenhoffpark, in the Biezen district near the city's rail yards, holds a giant sequoia measured in September 2020 at just under four metres around and about 25 metres tall, likely planted sometime in the 1920s though no source gives an exact date, an inference from size rather than a documented planting. That gap in the record is honest rather than a failure of research: this is a neighbourhood park, not an estate or a botanical garden with its own archive, and the tree's presence here at all says more about the era than about any specific person who planted it. Giant sequoias reached Europe from California's Sierra Nevada in the 1850s and became a genuine planting fashion among estate owners and, eventually, municipal parks departments for the next three quarters of a century, moving a tree that can live past 2,000 years into gardens designed to last decades. In its native range this specimen would be barely into adolescence; in a small Dutch park surrounded by early 20th-century housing, it is already the tallest living thing most residents will see on a walk to the shops. Free, small and unglamorous by the standards of Nijmegen's grander parks, it rewards anyone who actually looks up.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Nijmegen?: Very likely the beech circle of Sterrenbos in Park Brakkenstein, part of an 18th-century star-shaped forest, estimated at 250 to 300 years old.
Are Nijmegen's ancient trees free to visit?: Yes, all five are in public parks with free access.
Which Nijmegen tree created a plant variety sold in garden centres?: A ginkgo in Kronenburgerpark, whose witch's-broom branch mutation was grafted and registered in 1995 as the dwarf cultivar Ginkgo biloba 'Mariken'.
Why was a chestnut tree planted in Julianapark on 4 September 1948?: To mark the day Princess Juliana became Queen of the Netherlands after her mother Wilhelmina's abdication.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Nijmegen? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Browse themed collections of remarkable trees.
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Walk 4 of these trees about 3.2 km, 43 min on foot