The Van Soutelandelaan Oak

This oak is roughly a century and a half older than every building around it. It stands in the green behind the Van Soutelandelaan, in Mariahoeve, a district that did not exist until the late 1950s, when The Hague ran out of room inside itself and put a whole neighbourhood of flats and low blocks on the estate land north east of the Haagse Bos. The register dates the oak to between 1810 and 1820, so it is somewhere past its 205th year and probably not much past its 215th. It was already a substantial tree when the ground here was still pasture and country house. Planners of that generation usually levelled a site and started from nothing; here the wood was built around instead, and a handful of trees from the estate era still stand between the blocks. A beech of nearly the same age grows about two hundred metres away, which turns this into a short walk with two old trees in it rather than a single stop. Nobody wrote down who planted the oak or why. If you grew up in this corner of Mariahoeve and know the story, tell us.