Nijmegen calls itself the oldest city in the Netherlands, and its trees mostly agree in spirit if not in age: none predate the Romans, but nearly all grow on ground that does. A sycamore chosen tree of the year on a hilltop fort, a ginkgo that accidentally created a garden-centre variety, a star-shaped forest's surviving beech circle, and a chestnut planted for a queen. Three more sit east of the city, where the ridge holds the old ones: limes on the plateau the Romans picked for its view, a churchyard yew, and the thickest tree in the country.
0 / 22 visitadas em Nijmegen
1
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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2
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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3
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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4
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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5
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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6
The Hornbeam of Krayenhoffpark
Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) · ~120 years · Biezen
This hornbeam stands close enough to Krayenhoffpark's giant sequoia to be mistaken for an afterthought planted in the famous tree's shadow, but it is roughly the same age and belongs to a species the Dutch have grown for a very different reason. Where the sequoia was an imported curiosity, hornbeam is a native workhorse, historically clipped into hedges and avenues across the Low Countries because it tolerates hard pruning and holds its dead brown leaves through winter, giving a bare hedge some cover even in the coldest months.
The register dates this one to somewhere around 1900 to 1910, planted while the Biezen neighbourhood around it was still going up to house railway workers from the nearby yards. Left to grow naturally rather than clipped, as this one has been, hornbeam reaches a modest, broad-crowned shape closer to a beech than to the tight hedge most people picture. It grows a few metres from the park's sequoia, free, in the same small green space that gives an otherwise unremarkable railway district its one patch of shade older than most of the houses around it.
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7
The Black Locust of Krayenhoffpark
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · ~140 years · Biezen
The Dutch name for this tree translates literally as false Christ's-thorn, a reference to the sharp paired spines that line its young branches, thorns sharp enough that European folklore once linked the species to the biblical crown of thorns despite the tree being a North American import that no one in the region had ever seen before the 17th century. This specimen, dated by the register to around 1880 to 1890, predates its own park: Krayenhoffpark and the railway workers' housing around it were built in the early 20th century, decades after this tree first went into what was then open ground on the edge of the city.
Black locust fixes nitrogen in the soil through bacteria living on its roots, the same trick clover and beans use, which is part of why it was planted so widely across poor European soils long before anyone understood the chemistry behind why it thrived where other trees struggled. It stands a few steps from the park's hornbeam and its better-known giant sequoia, free, the oldest of the three despite being the least conspicuous.
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8
The Chestnut of Begraafplaats Daalseweg
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · ~140 years · Altrade
Four Catholic parishes petitioned Nijmegen's city council in 1884 for permission to open a shared cemetery on the Daalseweg, and the bishop of 's-Hertogenbosch consecrated it the following June. The city architect Jan Jacob Weve designed the grounds around two broad paths crossing at right angles, lined with copper beeches he is himself buried among, and this sweet chestnut grows on the cemetery's west side from roughly the same founding decade. The cemetery closed to new burials in 1948 when a replacement opened elsewhere, and many graves were later cleared for housing, but the grounds survived intact enough to be named a national heritage site in 2002.
The cemetery holds a harder history than most: 300 victims of the February 1944 bombing of Nijmegen, a raid that killed roughly 800 people in a single afternoon, were buried here. Sweet chestnut is not native this far north, introduced originally by the Romans for its edible nuts, and this one has stood through the cemetery's whole active life and its decades since as a protected historic ground rather than a working one. It grows in the open, free to visit during normal cemetery hours, a short walk from Julianapark's own commemorative chestnut.
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Foto: MPhernambucq (CC BY-SA 3.0)
9
The Kabouterboom
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · 300 to 400 years, and by some accounts 450 · Beek, Berg en Dal
Children in Beek have been told for generations that gnomes live inside this tree, which is how a sweet chestnut came to be called the Gnome Tree. It is an easy story to believe. The trunk is hollow, at least eight and a half metres around, and the openings in it are the size of doorways.
That girth makes it the thickest tree in the Netherlands, and the hollowness is why nobody can say how old it is: there is no core left to count. Estimates run from three hundred years to four hundred and fifty. The register that lists it puts the planting between 1600 and 1700 and notes that chestnuts have probably been grown around Nijmegen since the Romans, who liked the crop and liked this ridge.
In January 2005 children set it on fire. It burned inside, which a hollow tree does readily, and everyone assumed that was the end of four centuries. It leafed out again that spring and has gone on since.
It stands in the Kastanjedal, a valley of old chestnuts in the Heerlijkheid Beek estate, which Het Geldersch Landschap keeps open to walkers.
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10
The Limes of the Kopse Hof
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · 225 to 275 years · Kopse Hof
The Romans picked this spot in about 12 BC and built a fort on it, because from sixty four metres up you can see the Waal, the Ooijpolder, the Betuwe and most of the way to Arnhem. Eighteen centuries later somebody planted limes for the same view.
The group stands on the hilltop at the end of a lime avenue, and the two were almost certainly planted together, the avenue as the way up to the hill. The register dates both between 1750 and 1800 and can show its working: the hill is on the Tranchot map of 1803, and both the avenue and the hill are drawn on the cadastral map of 1811.
It lists the hilltop group under a category that has nothing to do with size. They are recorded as a kruisboom, a cross tree, which is what the Dutch register calls a tree planted for a religious purpose. The note says only that they may have served one, which is the honest version: nobody now knows what was meant to happen here.
The register counts three at the viewpoint. Locally they are called the four apostles, which suggests there were once four, and that is the kind of arithmetic old trees usually lose.
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11
The Yew of the Bartholomeuskerkje
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Beek, Berg en Dal
A charter of 1286 is the first mention of the little church this tree stands beside, and the churchyard around it has been in use ever since. The building had a hard nineteenth century: shared between Catholics and Protestants from 1796, neglected by both, closed in 1824 as unsafe, and only saved when King William I put money towards its repair.
The yew was there through all of it. The register records a painting by Barend Cornelis Koekkoek from about 1830 showing the church with this tree beside it, already looking like it had been standing a long while, and concludes the tree is probably older than two hundred years. That is one source making a careful argument rather than a measurement, so treat the age as an argument too.
What is not in doubt is what a yew does with time. It grows slowly, hollows early, and then keeps going for centuries after the point where any other tree would have finished, which is why yews and graveyards have kept each other company across northern Europe for a thousand years.
The churchyard is open, small, and quiet, and the foundation that looks after it describes it as park-like. That is fair.
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12
The Wilhelminaboom of Hertogplein
Lime (Tilia sp.) · Centrum
Nijmegen crowned a queen with a tree. On 1 September 1898, five days before Wilhelmina's coronation, the city planted a lime on Hertogplein and ringed it with a wrought iron fence topped with small crowns, designed by the architect Derk Semmelink. The fence survived the German occupation. Its crowns did not: soldiers stripped them during the war, and the fence stood bare until 24 July 1948, when students at Nijmegen's trade school forged replacements and the city held a public ceremony to fit them back on.
Whether the tree itself survived that long is less certain. Dutch Wikipedia's own account of the square says the original lime has since made way for another, without saying when. A 2025 local history piece describes the tree standing today and does not mention any replacement at all. The national tree register dates this spot to the 1880s, a decade before the coronation planting both other sources describe. Nobody has reconciled the three, so this page will not pretend to: what stands on Hertogplein now is a lime, ringed by a fence built for a different one, and its true age is unknown.
The fence, at least, is certain. It has outlived at least one tree already.
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13
The Beverboom of Park Leeuwenstein
Magnolia (Magnolia sp., exact species not confirmed) · roughly 140 years · Wolfskuil / Waterkwartier border, Nijmegen-West
Park Leeuwenstein is what is left of a demolished mansion's garden, and this magnolia is what is left of its exotic specimen trees. Villa Leeuwenstein went up in the mid-1800s and came down in 1958, too dilapidated to save, but the trees its owners planted around it kept growing after the house did not. A storm on 18 January 2018 took the park's giant sequoia and a swamp cypress in one night, leaving this tree, the beverboom, as the park's oldest surviving specimen.
Beverboom is old Dutch for magnolia, specifically for Magnolia virginiana, though the exact species growing here has not been confirmed. A 2023 local survey of the park still listed a cucumber magnolia, Magnolia acuminata, among its special trees, and it may be the same tree the national register pins here by coordinate rather than by name. Acuminata flowers greenish yellow after its leaves open in late spring; virginiana flowers cream white and fragrant in early summer. A photograph at flowering time would settle it.
Whichever it is, the register dates the planting to the 1880s, roughly 140 years, a specimen tree that has already outlived the house it was planted beside and two of its own neighbours.
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14
The Pastorie Chestnut of Lent
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 130 years · Lent, Nijmegen-Noord
A parish square in Lent doubles as a chestnut's front garden. The Onze Lieve Vrouw Geboorte church went up between 1877 and 1879, designed by the architect G. te Riele Wzn, and the register dates the chestnut on its forecourt to the following decade, planted around the time the church's own rectory rose beside it. The national heritage register's listing for the site still describes it today: an old chestnut tree stands on the square in front of the church, the rectory on its north side.
Lent itself has changed more than the tree has. It was a village on the Waal's north bank until Nijmegen annexed it in 1998, and since 2016 an artificial island and a new bridge have turned its riverside fields into the city's newest district. The square with the chestnut sits a few streets back from all of that, beside the road into what is still, for now, a village centre with its own parish rather than a suburb of one.
The tree is roughly 130 years old and stands in the open, free to see at any hour, a short walk from Lent's own railway station.
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15
The Weeping Beech of Begraafplaats Daalseweg
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · roughly 125 to 135 years, from the register's planting band of 1890-1900 · Nijmegen-Midden
A weeping beech droops on purpose. Every ordinary beech reaches up for its share of light; this one carries a mutation that pulls its branches down instead, so its crown pours toward the ground rather than spreading for the sky. It stands to the right of the entrance gate at Begraafplaats Daalseweg, the first tree a visitor meets.
The cemetery itself is a protected national monument, not for any single tree but for its whole design: two paths cross the grounds, both lined with beeches, meeting at a crucifix at the centre. The weeping beech at the gate breaks that planned rhythm on purpose, an ornamental flourish set apart from the disciplined rows behind it.
The Dutch national register of monumental trees dates the planting to between 1890 and 1900, putting it at roughly 125 to 135 years old, and lists it as the cemetery's own protected specimen. It is the only source found for this particular tree: local histories of the cemetery describe the beech-lined paths and the crucifix at length but none names this one specifically, so the age comes from the register alone.
The grounds belong to a working Catholic cemetery and stay open during daylight hours, free to enter. Go quietly.
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16
The Plane of the Petruskerk
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 145 to 155 years, from the register's planting band of 1870-1880 · Hees
London planes shed their bark instead of quietly laying down new rings underneath it, sloughing off patches through the year to show paler wood beneath, which is why an old plane looks mottled and half-flayed rather than simply weathered. This one stands on the small square beside the Petruskerk in Hees, a Nijmegen district that was its own village before the city grew out to meet it.
The Dutch national monumental tree register dates the planting to between 1870 and 1880, making the tree roughly 145 to 155 years old, and lists it as protected. That register is the only source found naming this specific tree: histories of the square and the church describe the setting in detail but not this plane by name, so the age rests on the register's word alone.
The square sits on church grounds and reads as ordinary open public space, a small plaza in front of a working parish rather than an enclosed courtyard, and the register itself records it as visitable. Nothing else about this particular tree has surfaced yet. If you know more, tell us.
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17
The Copper Beech of the Antonius Abtkerk
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 225 to 275 years, from the register's planting band of 1750-1800 · Hees
This copper beech is older than the church beside it. The current Sint Antonius Abtkerk on Dennenstraat, a red-brick building by the architect Pieter Cuypers, went up in 1879 and 1880. The national register places the beech at the boundary of the church and its rectory somewhere between 1750 and 1800, roughly a century older than the bricks next to it.
That is not as strange as it sounds. The parish itself predates Cuypers by centuries: an older church stood on this ground before his, a barn chapel was rebuilt here in 1826, and parish history traces the site back to a sixteenth century predecessor. A beech planted in the late 1700s would have grown up beside whatever building stood here then, and simply outlasted it, the way old trees on church land tend to.
Copper beeches carry a mutation that floods their leaves with red pigment, so from a distance this one reads almost black against the brick. The Dutch national monumental tree register is the only source found for this specific tree, roughly 225 to 275 years old by its planting estimate; local parish and heritage histories confirm the site's long religious use but do not mention the beech itself, so the age stands on the register alone.
The grounds are recorded as visitable and visible from outside, ordinary church land in the Hees district rather than a closed private garden.
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18
The Silver Maple of Sumatraplein
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · roughly 100 to 125 years, sources disagree · Nijmegen-Oost
Most of Nijmegen's protected trees carry the register's full monumental status. This one carries a lower rank, 'potentieel', a candidate rather than a confirmed monument, which changes nothing about standing in front of it: a silver maple on a residential street in Nijmegen-Oost, somewhere past its first century.
Acer saccharinum grows fast and splits easily, which is why American cities stopped planting it as a street tree decades before European ones did; the trees that survive from an early planting wave tend to be the ones nobody got around to replacing. This one has made it that far on a municipal verge, owned and maintained by the city rather than a private garden, which is also why it can carry a public register entry at all.
Two city records disagree on when it went in: the national monumental tree register puts it at 1900 to 1910, the municipality's own tree-management dataset says 1930. Neither is a measurement, and no girth has been recorded for this one, so treat any single number as an estimate. It stands in the open on Sumatraplein, free to see at any hour, about twenty minutes on foot from the station.
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19
The Horse Chestnut of Landhuis Brakkenstein
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · uncertain, two sources disagree · Heijendaal
Nijmegen's own city register and the national monumental tree register agree on almost nothing about this horse chestnut except where it stands. One says it went into the ground around 1830, making it nearly two centuries old. The other says 1920, barely past its first century. Neither figure is a measurement, both are estimates carried on separate paperwork, and eighty years is too wide a gap to average away.
What both records do agree on is the spot: a trunk about two and three quarter metres round, standing by the villa at Landgoed Brakkenstein, a star-shaped eighteenth-century park layout in Heijendaal. The estate's own lanes were planted mostly with beech, except for one western avenue lined in horse chestnuts, which raises the honest possibility that this tree began as part of that planting rather than a lone specimen chosen for the villa's front lawn.
The 1865 neoclassical villa it grows beside now hosts events and dinners rather than a resident family, but the grounds around it stay open the way a city park is open: no gate, no ticket, just a walk through Heijendaal past Radboud University. Two registers, two ages, one honest tree, and a question nobody has settled: was it planted for the house, or was it already there?
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20
The Beech of Landhuis Brakkenstein
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · uncertain, two sources disagree · Heijendaal
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.
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21
The Boom van Lücker
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · about 25 years (planted 2000) · Nijmegen-Oost
In 1924 an art teacher bought a chestnut tree with the money from a print he had made of it.
The tree here now is not that one, and the difference is the whole story. Eugene Lucker's chestnut had germinated on this spot somewhere between 1770 and 1794, sources differ, and by the 1920s workmen had arrived to fell it. Lucker and Jonkheer van der Goes van Naters, later a parliamentary leader for the Dutch labour party, stopped them, raised a hundred guilders by selling Lucker's own linocut of the tree, and bought it outright. They founded the Nijmeegsche Vereeniging voor Natuurschoon the same day, and organised nature conservation in Nijmegen begins there.
That chestnut sickened and came down in 1996, fourteen metres tall and three metres round. The association dissolved the same year and sold the ground to the city for one guilder. The city kept the promise attached to it: in 2000 the artist Diane Dyckhoff planted a young sweet chestnut diagonally across the street and set it inside a circle of steel rings and blue gravel, the rings standing in for growth rings this tree has not grown yet.
So you walk to a tree of about twenty-five years on an address that has carried a chestnut since the 1700s, minus the four years in between. A round plaque in the pavement marks the old one's spot. The young one is about ten metres further on, past the Broerweg junction, right side heading out of town.
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22
The Mariaboom of Marienbosch
Lime (Tilia sp.) · over 200 years (core-sampled) · Groesbeekseweg / Heyendaal, Nijmegen-Oost
A map drawn in 1570 already marks this spot as het Maria en boomken, the Mary and the little tree.
A borer put into the linden growing there now returned an age of over two hundred years, which makes the trunk a good deal younger than the name. The Bomenstichting, which took that reading, suspects it stands on the shoulders of a much older root system, though that comes from the continuity of the site rather than from anything measured in the wood.
What the hill has seen is a long habit of walking to a tree. Into the early twentieth century a tea pavilion stood beside the linden, where women of the local gentry took their tea in its shade. After the Marienbosch monastery and boarding school went up in 1924, an annual procession set out from central Nijmegen, sang a Marian hymn under the branches and hung an image of Mary in them. A chapel was planned and never built. A stone column carrying a statue of Mary stood here and has since disappeared.
The tree sits on a low rise off the main paths in the Marienbosch woods and does not announce itself, so this is one you go looking for rather than come across. Nobody has pinned down which lime it is either: the account that dated it calls it simply a linden. If you can tell a small-leaved from a broad-leaved one at the leaf, tell us which is standing on the Mariaheuvel.
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