What is the oldest tree in The Hague?

The Hague's oldest confirmed tree survives specifically because it never had to compete for space in open, public ground. The Heilige Geesthofje's pear has spent nearly four centuries inside a walled almshouse courtyard that has functioned continuously as a residence since 1616, protected by the same institutional boundary that has kept the almshouse itself intact while the city rebuilt around it. Its closest rival for genuine age, the Koekamp oak at roughly 300 years, took the opposite route: growing in land that was never private at all, protected instead by a 1576 promise from William of Orange that the Haagse Bos would never be logged for timber, a guarantee that has held for four and a half centuries with only one serious interruption, wartime felling under German occupation. Both routes worked. What links every tree on this list, from a 290-year-old escapee of a formal garden to a 94-year-old oak a neighbourhood has turned into a shared piece of folklore, is that each one found a boundary, legal, institutional or simply social, that nobody had reason to cross.