The Oak of the 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.