The Koekamplinde

For eighty years the Blauwe Tram, The Hague's old regional line, rattled past this lime on its way out of the city, and the tree outlasted the tram entirely. It went into the ground around 1880, inside the Koekamp's Hertenkamp, a deer enclosure whose fence kept it in view but out of reach for well over a century. When the Koningstunnel was designed in the 1990s to carry traffic from Den Haag Centraal toward the Bosbrug, the planned route ran straight at this linden and at a horse chestnut standing fifty metres away. Both were spared: the tunnel's line was bent sideways at the drawing-board stage specifically to avoid moving them, a decision the city made before a single steel plate was laid. The chestnut still got hauled eighty metres on rails in 1997. This lime never had to move at all. When the park was restored in 2005 and the old deer fencing came down, people started doing what a century of enclosure had made impossible, sitting under it. It has been one of the Koekamp's default gathering spots since, host to picnics, music and the occasional demonstration, ten minutes on foot from the station. Its own planting date is loose, somewhere between 1870 and 1880, but the tunnel that curves around it is not.