The Sycamore of Valkhofpark

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.