Utrecht's oldest trees live behind walls more often than in open parks, protected first by a university's own working garden and later by simple survival. The city's genuine standout is a walled botanical garden barely bigger than a single city block, home to a ginkgo that predates the Netherlands' current constitution and a Chinese tree so rare it took a missionary decades to bring seeds to Europe at all. Add a farmhouse linden absorbed whole by a science campus, and a park cluster of century-old planes planted when the city's old defences became parkland.
0 / 27 visitadas em Utrecht
Foto: Hansmuller (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
The Uithof Linden
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · about 275 years · De Uithof, Utrecht Science Park
This linden has outlived the entire farming landscape it was planted into. It went into the ground around 1750 on the south side of a farmhouse called de Uithof, following a Dutch custom of the time: plant a linden on a farmhouse's sunniest side and it will shade the house all summer while dropping its leaves in time to let winter light back in. That practical 18th-century logic is most of why lindens are the tree most often found beside old Dutch farms, more common there than any species chosen for beauty alone. The land around this particular farmhouse, once part of a monastery estate called Oostbroek, gave its name centuries later to something nobody planting the tree could have predicted: De Uithof, now Utrecht Science Park, one of the largest university campuses in the Netherlands, built up around the old farm over the second half of the 20th century. The farmhouse itself survives as a listed national monument, a low 17th-century building now surrounded by university faculties and student housing rather than fields. At roughly 275 years old, the linden is one of the oldest Dutch lindens still standing anywhere, having watched a working farm turn into a research campus without ever leaving the spot it was planted for shade.
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Foto: Hansmuller (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
The Oude Hortus Ginkgo
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · over 260 years · Binnenstad
A ginkgo is either male or female for its entire life, except this one, which has been both since sometime in the 19th century, when a gardener grafted a female branch onto the male trunk so the tree could finally produce the seeds its species is famous for. The graft still shows on the bark today, a visible seam between two sexes on one plant, and it worked: this ginkgo, planted around 1770 in what was then Utrecht University's working medicinal garden, is now old enough that the University Museum's own researchers call it possibly one of the oldest ginkgos growing anywhere outside Japan. The species itself had only just reached Europe when this seedling went into the ground, imported from a country most Dutch botanists of the time had never visited, decades before Charles Darwin was born. The garden around it operated as a teaching collection for medicinal and useful plants from 1723 until 1920, when the university's plant science moved elsewhere and left this walled plot as what it is today, a quiet historic garden behind the University Museum rather than a working laboratory. The tree has outlived that entire purpose. A visit requires a museum ticket, the price of admission for standing next to something that predates the country's current constitution by decades.
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Foto: Djuna Vaesen (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3
The Handkerchief Tree of the Oude Hortus
Handkerchief Tree (Davidia involucrata) · not documented · Binnenstad
For about ten days every May, this tree looks like it is covered in hundreds of small white handkerchiefs, or according to the alternative common name, a flock of ghosts caught mid-flutter. What actually flowers are pairs of oversized white bracts, modified leaves rather than petals, that hang beneath each small flower cluster and catch any breath of wind. Davidia involucrata was unknown to Western botany until 1869, when the French missionary and naturalist Armand David first documented it in the mountains of central China, and it stayed a horticultural rarity for decades afterward because its seeds are notoriously reluctant to germinate, sometimes taking two winters before anything happens at all. Utrecht's specimen, in the walled garden behind the University Museum, is one of the relatively few handkerchief trees the Netherlands has managed to establish and keep alive to a real size, now tall enough to tower over the path beneath it. Outside its two-week May window, it reads as an unremarkable mid-sized tree with heart-shaped leaves, nothing that would make a passerby stop. The garden rewards exactly that kind of patience: come at the wrong time and miss the point entirely, come in May and understand immediately why a tree can be worth crossing a continent for.
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4
The Oude Hortus Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · over 150 years · Binnenstad
Every part of this tree is poisonous except the bright red flesh around its seed, which birds eat happily while leaving the seed itself, the one genuinely toxic part, to pass through unharmed and land somewhere new. That single evolutionary trick is most of why yews are found planted beside old churches and gardens across Europe: birds do the planting, humans get the credit. This yew has stood in Utrecht University's old botanical garden for at least 150 years, part of a teaching collection that once used its poisonous foliage as a live lesson in medicinal and dangerous plants rather than as a specimen prized for size or age alone. Yews grow slowly and live long by almost any measure, routinely reaching centuries in places nobody has disturbed them, and this one has had a walled, tended garden to itself for its entire recorded life, none of the storm damage or development pressure that shortens most urban trees' lives. It stands quietly among the ginkgo and rarer imports from China, easy to walk past without a second look, though it has technically been capable of killing anyone who ate the wrong part of it since long before any visitor reading this was born.
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Foto: Basvb (CC BY-SA 3.0 NL)
5
Onder de Linden
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · about 190 years · Binnenstad
The southern stretch of the Nieuwegracht has been called Onder de Linden, literally under the lindens, since at least the 17th century, when the canal first got a uniform planted row of trees in 1660. The trees standing there today are not that old: sources place the current lindens at around 1830, meaning at least one replanting happened somewhere in the intervening 170 years, though no record pins down exactly when or why. What survives is the pattern rather than any single tree, a continuous double row shading the water between the Quintijnsbrug and Brigittenbrug bridges, close enough to the original 17th-century design that the old name still fits. Utrecht's canal-side streets, Nieuwegracht and Oudegracht both, are unusual among Dutch cities for having a lower service level built at water height beneath the upper street, a two-tier system that shaped how the trees above could root and grow for centuries. The lindens here have had to share cramped underground space with wharf cellars and canal walls the whole time, which likely explains why Utrecht's canal trees rarely reach the size of specimens planted in open parkland. None of that shows from the towpath. What shows is dense, cool shade over green water on even the hottest days, the same effect this stretch of canal has been named for since before the Dutch Golden Age had properly started.
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6
The Copper Beech of Hieronymusplantsoen
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 135 to 190 years, sources disagree · Binnenstad
Utrecht's own tree register cannot agree with itself about this copper beech. One entry, filed for the national Bomenstichting listing, dates its planting to the 1880s. The municipality's own separate file says something older, that it was planted along with the rest of Hieronymusplantsoen by the landscape architect J.D. Zocher in 1835, part of the decades-long project that turned Utrecht's old medieval walls and moat into the ring of parks still circling the historic centre today. Both cannot be right, and nobody has settled which, so this page states both rather than picking the more flattering one.
Either way it has stood on this small rise in the plantsoen for well over a century, its purple-red leaves a deliberate accent against the plane and elm green Zocher planted around it. Copper beech is not a distinct species but a colour form of the ordinary beech, propagated by grafting, because a beech grown from its own seed reverts to green more often than not, which makes every specimen a small act of continued human intervention rather than a wild event. It grows on open parkland in front of the building known locally as the Vrije School, no fence and no ticket. If a photograph or a planting record settles which date is right, tell us.
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7
The Zocher Planes of Hieronymusplantsoen
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · ~185 years · Binnenstad
Four Oriental planes stand together on one spot in Hieronymusplantsoen, registered nationally as a single monumental entry because whoever surveyed them treated the group, not any one trunk, as the thing worth protecting. Utrecht's municipal records date the planting to 1835, part of J.D. Zocher's decades-long project to turn the old defensive moat and city walls circling Utrecht into a continuous ring of English-style landscape parks, of which Hieronymusplantsoen is one surviving stretch.
Oriental plane is the straight species behind the hybrid London plane that lines most European streets, native from the Balkans to Iran and far less commonly planted in the Netherlands than its hybrid offspring. Four of them together, close to two centuries old, read as something closer to a small grove than four separate specimens, standing opposite the same building that borders the plantsoen's copper beech and, a short walk further, one of the country's most celebrated botanical gardens. They grow in the open on public parkland, unfenced, free to see any day. The register gives a single planting year for the whole group; nobody has independently dated an individual trunk within it, so treat 1835 as the group's founding date rather than a measurement of any one tree.
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8
The Oriental Plane of Janskerkhof
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · ~130 years · Binnenstad
Janskerkhof looks like a churchyard and mostly still is one, a square in central Utrecht built around the Gothic Jans Church, with a weekly flower market and, in its northeast corner near the old cantonal courthouse, a single Oriental plane the municipality dates to 1900. That makes it the youngest of the register's Utrecht street trees rather than the oldest, and its interest is less about age than about staying put: more than a century in a paved civic square that has hosted markets and gatherings throughout, without losing the tree that anchors its corner.
Oriental plane sheds bark in patches as it grows, the way a sycamore does, leaving a mottled grey, green and cream trunk that reads almost camouflaged against stone. This one has had over a century of pavement compaction and passing traffic to contend with, which the register does not comment on beyond dating the planting, so no vitality note beyond that exists yet. It stands in the open square, free to walk up to any day, opposite number 13 Janskerkhof. Nobody has published an independent account of this specific tree beyond the municipal register, so treat the date as the council's own record rather than a cross-checked fact.
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9
The Plane of Lucasbolwerk
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · ~130 years · Binnenstad
This London plane was already forty years old, well established on the Lucasbolwerk, when Utrecht's city theatre went up facing it in 1941. The Stadsschouwburg, designed by the Dutch modernist architect Willem Dudok and opened that September, is the newer thing on this stretch of the old singel parkland by a wide margin: the municipal tree register dates the plane's own planting to around 1900, part of the general planting of Utrecht's 19th-century park ring rather than anything tied to the building that came decades later.
Lucasbolwerk itself is one of the bastions of Utrecht's old city fortifications, absorbed into the landscaped singel park that rings the historic centre, the same project that gave the city Hieronymusplantsoen and the Zocherpark further along the water. The plane has spent well over a century watching that transformation from bastion to theatre forecourt, and now stands as the tree most people photograph the Stadsschouwburg's facade past without quite registering. It grows in the open on public parkland directly opposite the theatre entrance, free to see, no ticket needed even if the building behind it does require one.
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10
The Colchis Maple of Wilhelminapark
Cappadocian Maple (Acer cappadocicum) · roughly 140 years · Wittevrouwen / Wilhelminapark
Four stops earlier on the same walking route stands a very different tree from the same era: a Cappadocian maple, named for the ancient region of Cappadocia in central Anatolia, though its natural range runs north into the Caucasus too, where it is sometimes called Colchis maple instead, after the kingdom Jason sailed for in the story of the Golden Fleece. It grows at Wilhelminapark's west entrance, on the footpath opposite house number 28, one of the park's original plantings from the 1880s according to the Dutch national monumental tree register.
Acer cappadocicum keeps its leaves a plain green most of the year and then, in autumn, turns a uniform buttery yellow rather than the mixed reds and oranges of most maples, a colour show the park's own walking guide singles it out for. No girth is on record for this tree, and the register gives no basis for its planting decade beyond the record itself, so roughly a hundred and forty years old is an estimate rather than a measurement.
Wilhelminapark is a national monument in its own right, laid out in 1898 in the informal English landscape style, and this maple was already an established tree by the time the park's more famous specimens matured around it. It stands free to visit, a short walk or tram ride from the city centre.
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11
The Catalpa of Wilhelminapark
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · roughly 130 years · Wittevrouwen / Wilhelminapark
Wilhelminapark's own walking guide to its oldest trees calls this one Trompetboom, trumpet tree, the Dutch common name for catalpa, and once it flowers in July the name explains itself: white, orchid-shaped blooms crowd the canopy in dense clusters, followed by seed pods that hang on through winter looking like a stand of thin green beans left out to dry. Catalpa bignonioides grows broad and low rather than tall, its heart-shaped leaves among the largest of any tree commonly planted in Dutch parks.
The Dutch national monumental tree register dates this specimen to the 1890s, on the west edge of the park's play meadow, one of the original plantings from Wilhelminapark's founding as an English-style landscape park in 1898. No girth is recorded for it in any source found, and the planting decade rests on the register's own dating rather than a documented record, so treat the age, roughly a hundred and thirty years, as an estimate.
It is stop seventeen on the park's own Rondje Oude Reuzen trail past its oldest and most impressive trees, a route that also passes the wingnut and the Cappadocian maple mapped separately on this site. Free, in a public park a short walk from the centre.
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12
The Zocher Plane of Zonnenburg
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 190 years · Binnenstad / Zonnenburg bastion
In 1835, the landscape architect Jan David Zocher jr began replacing the demolished defensive ring around old Utrecht with a chain of parks, the Singelplantsoen, that still follows the city's medieval bastions today. This plane, standing just west of the old Sterrenwacht observatory on the Zonnenburg bastion, carries that exact year in the municipality's own planting record, making it one of the oldest trees anywhere along Zocher's design and roughly as old as the park scheme itself.
London plane, a hybrid of American sycamore and Oriental plane first bred in seventeenth century Europe, is the workhorse tree of the whole Singelplantsoen chain, planted for fast growth and tolerance of compacted city soil along a route that was walked and cycled hard from the day it opened. No girth is recorded for this specimen, but at close to two centuries old it should be among the largest planes on the route by now.
The Sterrenwacht itself, Utrecht University's historic observatory, still stands beside it, giving the tree one of the more improbable neighbours on this list: nearly two hundred years of watching people look up at the stars from the building next door. Free, public parkland, a short walk from the old city centre.
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13
The Servaasbolwerk Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 125 to 190 years, sources disagree · Binnenstad / Servaasbolwerk
Two dates exist for this plane, and the register that tracks it admits as much rather than picking one. The municipality's own planting list gives 1835, the year Jan David Zocher jr began laying out the Singelplantsoen ring parks this tree still stands in; an earlier entry from the Bomenstichting, the Dutch tree conservation foundation, instead recorded 1900 to 1910, a figure its own more recent register update calls probably a guess. A gap of sixty five years between two sources that both claim to know is unusual enough to state plainly rather than smooth over.
What is not in dispute is the tree itself: a London plane standing opposite house number 2 on Servaasbolwerk, part of the same bastion parkland chain as the Zocher Plane mapped separately nearby, and old enough either way to be one of the historic ring's mature specimens. No girth has been recorded.
Whichever date is right, the tree has stood through most or all of the twentieth century on a stretch of parkland built from a demolished city wall, watching the bastion go from defensive earthwork to quiet residential green space. Free, public, a few minutes' walk from Zonnenburg.
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Foto: Kattenkruid (CC BY 3.0)
14
The Liberation Beech of Servaasbolwerk
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 80 years · Binnenstad / Servaasbolwerk
This copper beech was planted to be looked at and remembered, not simply grown. Bevrijdingsbomen, liberation trees, went into the ground across the Netherlands after May 1945 as living memorials to the country's liberation from German occupation, and the Dutch national monumental tree register marks this one at Servaasbolwerk with exactly that designation: a herdenkingsboom, a memorial tree, from the same decade as the liberation itself.
Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea, the copper or purple beech, is a straightforward garden variety chosen for its colour rather than any rarity, dark reddish purple leaves through the growing season rather than the species' usual green. An independent record from 2015, a local history blog that photographed the tree and named it directly as a bevrijdingsbeuk, confirms both the species and the memorial purpose without giving an exact planting year, so the age here rests on the register's decade band rather than a specific date tied to the liberation itself.
At around eighty years old it is the youngest tree on this list by some margin, a reminder planted deliberately rather than grown accidentally into significance, standing on the same historic bastion parkland as the older planes nearby. Free, public, in the heart of the old city.
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15
The Oriental Plane of Lepelenburg
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · roughly 120 years · Binnenstad / Lepelenburg
Lepelenburg was a defensive bastion on Utrecht's medieval city wall before it became a park around 1860, part of the same conversion that turned the whole ring of fortifications into the Singelplantsoen. This Oriental plane, the species that gives the London plane half its parentage, stands beside the Herenbrug bridge inside that park, dated by the Dutch national monumental tree register to the early 1900s, a later addition to the grounds rather than one of the original 1860s plantings.
Platanus orientalis is native to the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia, grown across Europe for centuries before its American-crossed hybrid became the more common street tree; a pure Oriental plane like this one is rarer to find in a Dutch park than its more widespread offspring. No girth has been recorded for it, and no source found names or dates this individual tree directly, so the record here rests on the register alone, corroborated only by Lepelenburg's own well documented general history rather than anything specific to this trunk.
It stands a few minutes' walk from Servaasbolwerk and Zonnenburg, within reach of the other bastion-park trees mapped on this site, on ground that has gone from a soldier's lookout to a footbridge crossing in under two centuries. Free, public parkland near the old city centre.
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Foto: DrAttendoloSforza (CC BY-SA 4.0)
16
The Markiezeneik of Amelisweerd
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 220 to 250 years · Amelisweerd / Bunnik border
An oak became a protest symbol and then won. The Markiezeneik stands in the Markiezenbos, part of the Amelisweerd estate on Utrecht's edge, and for years it was the named face of a campaign against a plan to widen the A27 motorway straight through the wood, a project that would have taken roughly 800 trees along with it. In 2022 the oak won Boom van het Jaar, the Netherlands' national Tree of the Year contest, with nearly 37,000 votes, then placed ninth in the European contest the year after, an unusually direct way for a country to vote on a road scheme.
In March 2026 the country's highest administrative court, the Raad van State, annulled the underlying decision over unresolved nitrogen rules, killing the widening for now. The oak is still standing to hear about it: planted in the late 18th century by the marquis who then owned the estate, it carries the bark scars of an old lightning strike, healed over now with new growth around the wound.
Free, public forest, open sunrise to sunset. Bus 41 from Utrecht Centraal reaches Oud Amelisweerd in about fifteen minutes, then a short walk into the wood.
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17
The Thickest Plane of the Zocherpark
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 190 years · Binnenstad / Zonnenburg-Servaasbolwerk bastion
Zocherpark is not one park but a chain of them: Zonnenburg, Servaasbolwerk, Lepelenburg, Hieronymusplantsoen and Wilhelminapark, roughly three kilometres of bastion parkland laid out where Utrecht's old city walls used to run. Somewhere along that chain grows the thickest London plane of the lot, on the plantsoen just north of the old Sterrenwacht observatory, and a local canal-touring guide has done the measuring nobody else bothered to write down: 629 centimetres round and about 27 metres tall.
The city's own monumental tree register dates the planting to the 1830s, and the independent route guide narrows that to 1835, putting the tree at around 190 years old, roughly contemporary with the observatory it now shades. It stands close enough to three other registered trees in the same bastion cluster that a visit here becomes a short walk rather than a single stop, though this one carries its own separate register number and is not to be confused with a second plane about 80 metres to the southwest.
Free, public park, open during normal park hours, about 15 minutes' walk from Utrecht Centraal.
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18
The Old Copper Beech of Servaasbolwerk
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 140 years · Binnenstad / Servaasbolwerk
Two beeches stand roughly 45 metres apart on the same small stretch of Servaasbolwerk, and it is easy to walk past one thinking you have already seen the other. This one is the older by a wide margin. The Dutch national monumental tree register bands its planting to the 1880s, decades before the neighbouring copper beech went into the ground in 1945 as a liberation memorial. Both wear the same deep red foliage that turns darker through autumn, which is exactly what makes the two easy to confuse on a walk along the old singel parkland.
The distinction matters because one tree carries a specific historical claim, a wartime memorial planted the year Germany surrendered, and the other does not. This is the other: a beech that was already sixty years old when its younger neighbour was planted, with a trunk that has since thickened to four metres around. Its exact planting year has not been pinned down closer than a decade, so treat any single year you read elsewhere with some suspicion.
It stands on public gemeente parkland, part of the belt of bastions and gardens that replaced Utrecht's old city defences, open at any hour with nothing to buy a ticket for.
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Foto: Gijs Romijn (CC BY)
19
The Oriental Plane of Van Asch van Wijckskade
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · roughly 140 years · Binnenstad, near Begijnekade
The leaf gives it away before anything else does. Where a London plane's leaf has broad, shallow lobes, an Oriental plane's is cut almost to the base into narrow fingers, and the tree on Van Asch van Wijckskade is the real thing, not the more common hybrid that fills most European streets. Its trunk has grown to five and a half metres around, thick enough that the Dutch monumental tree register simply calls it a large presence on a street that does not have many.
The register's own notes place it beside a school building, which under normal circumstances would be reason to leave a tree off this list. This one clears that bar anyway: the plane itself grows on the public kade, the paved towpath along the canal, not inside the schoolyard, and it is visible and reachable from the street at any hour without setting foot on the school's own ground.
Planted sometime between 1870 and 1900, which puts it at roughly a century and a half old without pinning down a firmer date, it grows at the quiet northern edge of Utrecht's historic centre, near Begijnekade, a fifteen minute walk from the bastion parkland where three of its neighbours on this list also stand.
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20
The Turkey Oaks of Geertebolwerk
Turkey Oak (Quercus cerris) · roughly 155 to 190 years · Binnenstad / Geertebolwerk
Four Turkey oaks grow together on the old Geertebolwerk bastion, close enough beside the water that the Dutch monumental tree register counts them as one entry rather than four. Two went into the ground around 1835, when Utrecht's medieval defences were being reshaped into public parkland, and two followed around 1870. Two of the four have grown double stemmed from about two metres up, forking into pairs of trunks that make the group read as more than four trees from a distance.
Quercus cerris carries a Dutch name that is easier to remember than its Latin one: moseik, moss oak, for the shaggy, mossy cups that hold its acorns, unlike the smooth cups of the native oaks nearby. The register gives the group a shared girth of roughly three and seventy metres and a height of about twenty five, figures that describe the stand rather than any single trunk within it.
With planting dates nearly forty years apart, the group's age spans roughly a century and a half to nearly two centuries, and no single figure captures it honestly. They stand in the open, on public gemeente parkland, a fifteen minute walk from Utrecht Centraal.
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21
The Beech of Lucasbolwerk
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 165 years · Binnenstad / Lucasbolwerk
This copper beech carries a health warning rather than just an age. A canal-route survey of Utrecht's monumental trees, last updated in September 2025, reports the tree infected with reuzenzwam, giant polypore, a fungus that rots roots and trunk bases from the inside and has already killed a different Utrecht beech on record a short walk away at the Maliebaan roundabout. As of that September visit the tree did not yet appear to be suffering seriously, in the surveyor's own words, but the infection is real and worth watching rather than ignoring.
The Dutch monumental tree register places its planting between 1850 and 1860; the municipality's own separate record says 1870. Both figures are published and neither has been reconciled, so this page gives the wider range, somewhere between 150 and 176 years old. A 2005 survey measured it at four metres thirty around and nineteen metres tall, numbers now two decades old and likely conservative for a tree that has kept growing since.
It stands in the open on Lucasbolwerk, the same bastion park as the published Plane of Lucasbolwerk a short walk away. If you visit and the crown looks thin or the bark shows fresh damage near the base, that is worth telling us.
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22
The Maple of the Memorial Beech
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · roughly 136 to 146 years, from the register's planting band of 1880-1890 · Zonnenburg
This tree's address is another tree. The national register of monumental trees gives it no house number and no street: it is filed as the one standing just south of the memorial beech on Zonnenburg, which is what happens to a large maple in a park where the neighbours have better stories.
Zonnenburg is a bastion of Utrecht's medieval defensive wall. From 1835 the landscape architect Jan David Zocher jr turned that whole ring of fortifications into the Singelplantsoen, the chain of parks along the canal that the city still walks through, and the old observatory sits on this same piece of raised ground. The register dates the maple's planting to between 1880 and 1890, so roughly 136 to 146 years, a couple of generations later than the park it stands in.
Which maple it is, we cannot tell you. The register calls it a gewone esdoorn, a Dutch name that gets used for the sycamore and for the Norway maple both, and nobody has settled it for this specimen. The seeds decide it and you can do it from the path: sycamore carries its winged pairs hanging at roughly a right angle, Norway maple spreads them almost flat, in a straight line. Look up, then tell us which one is up there.
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23
The Copper Beech of the Servaasbolwerk
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 126 to 136 years, from the register's planting band of 1890-1900 · Servaasbolwerk
This stretch of canal has a beech problem, and it is worth saying out loud before you go looking. Within a few hundred metres the register holds another purple beech near Zonnenburg with a four metre trunk, a third by the Wittevrouwenbrug measuring 430 centimetres and rotting from the inside with giant polypore, and the liberation beech planted after 1945. None of those measurements belong to this tree. It is register number 1688712 and it carries no girth and no height of its own.
What identifies it is what it looks at. It stands on the Servaasbolwerk facing the Leeuwenberghkerk, the small church put up in the 1560s as a plague house by a city that expected to need one. The register dates the tree's planting to between 1890 and 1900, roughly 126 to 136 years, so it is a good half century older than the liberation beech down the path.
One gap we cannot close from the paperwork. The register records the genus and stops. Purple leaf in a beech is a mutation that turns up both as a nursery variety and by accident, and nothing on file says whether this specimen is genuinely copper-leaved. Go in May, when the new leaves are at their most translucent, and tell us what colour it actually is.
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24
The Old Pear of the Geertebolwerk
European Pear (Pyrus communis) · roughly 116 to 126 years, from the register's planting band of 1900-1910 · Geertebolwerk
An orchard would have cut this one down eighty years ago. Commercial pears are grubbed out when they stop paying, usually somewhere in their fifth decade. This one is roughly 116 to 126 years old by the register's planting band of 1900 to 1910, still flowers white every spring and still sets fruit, which is a career almost no pear tree is allowed to have.
It is a small tree and the numbers say so plainly: 11 metres tall, 182 centimetres around the trunk, measured by the canal-side survey of Utrecht's monumental trees, which also puts a species to it, the common pear, Pyrus communis. Against the planes and beeches of the singel it is easy to walk straight past. It is also, in a ring of parks planted entirely for ornament, one of very few trees here that produces something a person could eat. Whether the fruit is worth eating is a different question and nobody has written that down.
You will find it at the Geertebolwerk, at the water's edge level with Zilverstraat, on one of the bastions of the medieval wall that became public park ground in the nineteenth century. The survey that measured it calls it small, old and vital, which is a fair summary of why it is on this list at all: age here is not about size.
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25
The Black Walnut of the Tolsteegbrug
Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) · roughly 136 to 156 years, from the register's planting band of 1870-1890 · Tolsteegbrug
This tree poisons the ground under it. Black walnut roots leak juglone, a compound that stunts or kills a long list of plants that try to grow within reach, which is why anyone who inherits one gives up on tomatoes. In its native North America it is also the most valuable timber tree going, worth enough per log that thieves take them standing.
This one is 19 metres tall with a trunk 332 centimetres around, measured by the canal-side survey of Utrecht's monumental trees. It stands by the Tolsteegbrug at the southern end of the singel, beside the building that housed the university's school of governance and organisation studies. The register dates its planting to somewhere between 1870 and 1890, so 136 to 156 years old, and the band is that wide because nobody wrote down the year.
Autumn is when it makes itself known. The nuts come down in thick green husks the size of golf balls, and the husk stains whatever handles it a deep brown that takes a week to wear off, which is exactly what it was used for as a dye long before anyone in Europe planted the species to look at. The nut inside is worth eating and takes a hammer to reach.
The canal route through Utrecht's monumental trees ends at this tree, which makes it a reasonable place to stop walking.
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26
The Field Maple of the Bartholomeibrug
Field Maple (Acer campestre) · roughly 156 to 166 years, from the register's planting band of 1860-1870 · Bartholomeibrug
Every other maple in this city is an immigrant. The field maple is the only one native to the Netherlands, and it normally spends its life as hedge material, cut back over and over before anyone finds out what it could have become. This one was left alone from somewhere between 1860 and 1870, which makes it roughly 156 to 166 years old.
It is still small. Thirteen metres tall, a trunk 160 centimetres around, both figures taken by the canal-side survey of Utrecht's monumental trees. On an oak those numbers would be forgettable; for a field maple they are close to the ceiling of what the species does. What makes it worth stopping for is the shape. It grew bent and low on the south side of the Bartholomeibrug, leaning off the Pelmolenweg bank and out over the water rather than upward, a habit the survey singles out as unusual.
The tree gives away its own name if you look at the twigs, where young shoots grow corky ridges along their sides, and at the leaves, small and five-lobed with rounded rather than pointed tips. In October the whole thing turns butter yellow above the canal.
A hedge plant that was never cut, given a century and a half and a good spot on the water. That is the entire story here, and it is enough.
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27
The Dike Lime of Tull en 't Waal
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 225 to 275 years · Tull en 't Waal, on the Lekdijk, municipality of Houten
Boatmen on the Lek used to steer by this lime. A bakenboom, a beacon tree: one big tree on an otherwise bare dike is visible for kilometres from the water and fixes a bend of river that looks the same all the way along.
It was pollarded to do the job, cut off at over three metres so it would throw up a dense head of shoots instead of spreading. What stands there now is what happens when the pollarding stops. Twenty metres of crown have grown up out of the old cuts, on a trunk that was never shaped to carry it.
In 1943 an artillery shell hit the tree. It recovered well, which is the thing lime does better than almost anything else planted in this country: cut it, burn it or shell it and it comes back from whatever is left. That is why so many of the oldest trees in Dutch villages are limes rather than something more glamorous.
The Lekdijk is a working flood defence with a public path along the top, so you reach the tree along the same line the boatmen were reading it from, one side further in. At 225 to 275 years old it was already a landmark long before the shell found it.
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