Rhenen maps two trees, just over a kilometre apart. On the plateau at the top of the Grebbeberg stand the pollard oaks of the Koningstafel, low oaks cut back over and over inside the Heimenberg ring-wall, a seventh-century earthwork with the Rhine below. Out at Achterberg, on the ground of a castle pulled down around 1820, stands a hollow lime with a new stem growing up inside the shell, written into a deed of sale in 1922 to stop anyone felling it. Both are free.
0 / 2 visitadas em Rhenen
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The Pollard Oaks of the Koningstafel
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · documented since at least 1830; local tradition holds them considerably older · Grebbeberg, Rhenen, Utrecht
The plateau is named after a king who had lost his kingdom. Frederick V of the Palatinate, living in exile in the Dutch Republic, is said to have used this flat top of the Grebbeberg for hunting feasts in the seventeenth century and to have had a large stone table set there. That is where the name Koningstafel comes from, and it is a story about the place rather than about the trees.
The trees are the pollards along the west side: low oaks cut back over and over, some of them standing in circular groupings that make dating any single trunk difficult. The two sources disagree about how far back they go and both are kept here. Grebbeberg.nl records them from at least 1830 and calls them possibly much older; bomenbieb offers a planting band running from 1200 to 1750. The 1830 document is the safe floor. The rest is tradition.
They stand inside something older than any of those dates. The Heimenberg ring-wall around this plateau is a seventh-century earthwork and one of the oldest and largest defensive structures in the Netherlands, and the Rhine runs below it. In May 1940 the same ground was the battle of the Grebbeberg, and the site is a war memorial now.
Utrechts Landschap manages it. Free, waymarked, and about half an hour uphill from Rhenen station.
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Foto: WeeJeeVee (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Lime of Achterberg
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 350 to 400 years · Achterberg, Rhenen
In 1922 this lime was written into the deed of sale of the land around it, obliging whoever bought the farm to keep it standing.
Locally it is called the thousand-year lime of Achterberg. The national register of monumental trees rejects that flatly: certainly not a thousand years old, it says, and planted more than 350 years ago. That is still older than anything else on this stretch of the Gelderse Vallei. The trunk measures 6.03 metres around and is now entirely hollow, a standing shell with a fresh stem growing up through the middle of it.
It grew in the voorburcht, the outer bailey, of Kasteel Levendael. The castle was pulled down around 1820 and a farm went up on the site, so the tree is the last living piece of the place. Old Germanic custom held court under a lime, and local tradition says justice was done under this one, which is tradition rather than record.
The deed did not settle the matter. By 1965 the tree was in poor enough condition to be scheduled for felling, and the Copijn brothers argued for treating it instead. The techniques they used here are part of how tree surgery arrived in the Netherlands as a trade. Dutch arboriculture has a founding patient, and this is it.
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