The Koeweide Oak of Ockenburgh

Someone wrote a book length poem about this estate a century and a half before the oak was planted. Jacob Westerbaen, a Hague physician who turned poet, built Ockenburgh in the dunes behind Loosduinen in 1654 and then published thousands of lines describing his own grounds, walk by walk, tree by tree. The oak came much later. The register puts it in the 1810s, which makes it a little over two centuries old, growing on the north side of the Koeweide, the old cow pasture beside the country house. What it has watched is the estate's slow public turn. Ockenburgh went from private pleasure ground to a camping site to a municipal park, and the house itself stood derelict for years before it was restored. The dunes behind it were fortified during the German occupation, when the Atlantic Wall ran along this coast and large pieces of the landscape here were cleared for it. The oak kept its place on the pasture edge through all of it. The city owns the estate now and the gates and paths are free, which makes this one of the few two hundred year old trees in the country you can walk up to at any hour of any day.