The Beech Circle of Sterrenbos

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.