The Postzegelboom

Up to a hundred stamp collectors at a time used to crowd around this horse chestnut on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, trading and selling postage stamps under its branches for decades before the practice finally faded. The tree earned its name, the Postzegelboom, the stamp tree, from that informal open-air market rather than from anything botanical, and the trade continued through the years before the Second World War, when philatelists first started meeting under its leaves opposite the royal Noordeinde Palace. The tree itself predates that market by decades: it was already growing as a small tree in a private garden when King Willem II ordered every building opposite his palace demolished in the mid-19th century to make way for a Gothic Revival gallery. Those buildings themselves fell into disrepair and came down for good in 1883, but the chestnut, tucked into what had been someone's garden, was spared both rounds of demolition and left standing behind the new gallery. The Dutch postal service PTT thought enough of the connection to fund a full restoration by a tree surgeon in 1990, keeping alive both a monumental tree and the memory of the market that made it famous.