Tilburg is probably named after a lime tree, and the lime is not there any more. One stood on the Heuvel from about 1598, so wide that a visitor in 1667 counted 62 paces around the crown and 28 pillars holding it up. It was felled in 1994 against loud protest, and three of its descendants were planted on the square in 2009. So this page is the trees that survived instead: the oldest elm in the city, two in a park dug by unemployed men in the 1930s, and a lime that outlived the famous one by thirty years.
0 of 7 visited in Tilburg
1
The Oldest Elm of Tilburg
Dutch Elm (Ulmus x hollandica) · roughly 145 to 155 years, from the register's planting band of 1870 to 1880 · Wilhelminapark
The register says two things about this tree and both are worth having. It is the oldest elm in Tilburg, and it was already standing before the park was laid out around it.
That second fact is the interesting one. A park built around an existing tree is a different object from a park planted from nothing: somebody stood on this ground, looked at what was here, and drew the paths to keep it. The elm was the reason for a decision rather than the result of one.
Being the oldest elm anywhere in the Netherlands is a harder thing than it sounds. Dutch elm disease arrived here in the 1920s and the second, far more aggressive strain in the 1970s, and between them they killed most of the mature elms in the country. Whole avenues went. An elm that reached a century and a half through both waves did so partly by luck of position, standing alone in a park corner rather than in a line where the beetles could work along it.
It is in the south corner. Elms leaf late and hold on late, so in November it is often still green when the rest of the park has turned.
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2
The Silver Lime of the Frater Paullussehof
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · roughly 185 to 195 years, from the register's planting band of 1830 to 1840 · Centrum
The oldest tree standing in Tilburg is a lime, which in a town that may be named after a lime is a decent piece of luck, and it is not on the square where anyone would look for it.
Silver lime is worth learning to recognise, because the trick is easy and it works from thirty metres. The underside of every leaf is coated in fine white felt, so on a windy day the whole crown flickers between deep green and pale silver as the leaves turn over. No other large lime does this.
It has a second habit that is less charming. Silver lime flowers late, in July, and its nectar is famously hard on bumblebees; you sometimes find them stunned or dead under a big one in high summer. The mechanism has been argued over for decades and the current reading is that it is less about toxicity than about a starving late-season insect finding a huge, tempting, low-yield food source at the wrong moment.
So: go in July for the scent, which is heavy and carries a long way down a street, and look at the ground while you are there.
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3
The Canadian Poplar of the Wilhelminapark
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Wilhelminapark
Poplars are not supposed to get this old, which is the entire reason to go and look at this one.
Canadian poplar is a hybrid of the European black poplar and the American eastern cottonwood, first raised in France in the eighteenth century and then planted across Europe by the million for the same reason people plant it now: it grows faster than almost anything else, throwing up several feet a year on wet ground. The trade-off is that it is soft-timbered, brittle in storms and generally treated as a crop rather than a monument. A hundred years is a good run. Most are taken out well before that because a limb has come down.
This one is somewhere past a century and a half and still standing in the northeast corner of the park, which means it has been through every serious storm since the 1860s without losing enough to condemn it.
The sound is the other thing. Poplar leaves are held on flattened stalks that let the blade pivot, so the whole crown rattles in wind that barely moves the trees beside it. On a breezy day you hear this one before you see it.
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4
The Sessile Oak of the Korvelplein
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · roughly 115 to 125 years, from the register's planting band of 1900 to 1910 · Korvel
In 1923 they took the church off this square.
The old Korvel church stood in the middle of the Korvelplein. It was removed and replaced by a new one built at the edge, which left a large empty space in a busy district, and the response was to plant it properly with trees. This oak is one of those, and the register bands it slightly earlier, 1900 to 1910, so it may have been standing before the clearance and been kept.
It is a sessile oak rather than the pedunculate oak that turns up everywhere else in the Netherlands, and the difference is easy once you know it. Pedunculate oak hangs its acorns on long stalks and has almost no stalk on the leaf. Sessile oak does the reverse: acorns sitting tight against the twig, leaves on a clear stalk of a centimetre or more. Sessile is the upland species, the one that prefers drier and poorer ground.
A square is a hard place to be a tree. Paving over the roots, salt in winter, cars, and a hundred and twenty years of it. This one has managed, and the Korvelplein is one of the more pleasant squares in the city because of trees like it.
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5
The Silver Maple of the Leijpark
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · roughly 85 to 95 years, from the register's planting band of 1930 to 1940 · Leijpark
This park was dug by unemployed men.
Leonard Springer, the most sought-after garden architect in the Netherlands, drew the Leijpark in 1919 as his last large design. Then nothing happened for fifteen years: the land could not be bought and there was a farm sitting in the middle of it. It was finally laid out between 1934 and 1939 as a work relief project, in the depths of the depression, thirty hectares in the English landscape manner along the little river Leij that gives it its name.
So this silver maple was planted by men who were there because there was no other work. Springer designed the picture and never saw it finished.
Silver maple is another American import chosen for speed, and it has the finest-cut leaf of any maple you will meet here, deeply divided into five narrow lobes with silvery-white undersides. It flowers absurdly early, in March, before any leaf, small red and yellow tufts straight on the bare twigs. It is one of the first trees in the park to do anything at all after winter.
Stand in the middle of the park and it is the one with the pale flickering crown.
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6
The Oak of the Leijpark
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 85 to 95 years, from the register's planting band of 1930 to 1940 · Leijpark
The youngest tree on this page and the one that will outlast every other by centuries.
It went in with the rest of the Leijpark planting between 1934 and 1939, part of the work relief scheme that finally built Springer's 1919 design. At under a century it is barely started. Pedunculate oak routinely reaches four hundred years in the Netherlands and the veterans on sandy ground in Brabant go beyond that, which means the silver maple beside it, the poplar in the Wilhelminapark and the elm in the south corner will all be gone while this one is still filling out.
That is a genuinely strange thing to stand in front of. A park laid out in a depression by men who needed the wages, planted with trees on wildly different clocks, and the plainest one in it is the one making the long bet.
It is on the northwest side, in Springer's English landscape arrangement of grass opening into stands of trees. Come in October: an oak this age is producing serious quantities of acorns, and the ground under it is worth looking at.
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7
The Silver Lime of the Villa Garden
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · roughly 135 to 145 years, from the register's planting band of 1880 to 1890 · Fokkerpad
This small park was somebody's garden, designed by Leonard Springer.
That is all the register says about it, and it is enough to change how the place reads. Springer laid out estates, cemeteries, arboreta and the Leijpark on the other side of town, and he also took private commissions from people building villas. A garden of that kind was made to be walked in by one family. This one ended up as public ground, which is the usual fate of a nineteenth century villa garden in a city that grew past it.
The lime is from that planting, banded 1880 to 1890. Silver lime was a favourite of designers in exactly this period, because it does something no other large tree does: the white-felted undersides of the leaves make the whole crown pale and unsettled whenever there is wind, so a single one placed against darker trees lifts a composition without any need for flowers.
So look at it as a piece of design rather than as a specimen. It is standing where a professional put it, for a reason he could have explained, in a garden whose owner is long gone and whose gate is now open to everyone.
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