The Beech of Landhuis Brakkenstein

Fifteen metres from that horse chestnut stands a beech with a trunk over four metres round, thick enough that the city's own register lists a diameter class normally reserved for trees decades older than the planting date on file. That mismatch is the interesting part: the municipal record says 1880, about 146 years ago, while the national monumental tree register puts it at 1830 to 1840, closer to 190. A trunk this size fits the older number better, though nobody has resolved the disagreement and neither figure is a measurement rather than an estimate. It stands at Landgoed Brakkenstein, the eighteenth-century star-forest park in Heijendaal, beside the 1865 villa that gives both this tree and its chestnut neighbour their address. The park's own lanes were mostly planted in beech, so this could be an individual designation rather than a lane tree: its diameter class runs well above the beeches recorded along the avenue nearby, which is one reason it earned its own spot on the register rather than being folded into the avenue as a whole. Free to see, in an ordinary public park near Radboud University, no gate and no ticket. Two records, two ages, and a trunk that seems to be arguing for the older one.