What is the oldest tree in Tilburg?
The oldest tree near Tilburg is the Marialinde in Oisterwijk, a lime behind the Old Town Hall that is over 650 years old and locally said to approach a thousand. Within the city itself the register's oldest living trees are the twin planes behind the Paleis-Raadhuis, from a planting band of 1860 to 1870. The question is complicated by the tree most people mean when they ask it. A lime stood on the Heuvel, the city's central square, from about 1598, and it was cut down in 1994 at roughly five hundred years old. When the stump was lifted it turned out to be hollow, with a young shoot growing inside it from its own root. Three descendants of that tree were planted on the rearranged Heuvel on 26 March 2009, so there is a lime on the square again, but it is seventeen years old rather than five hundred.
Ages here come from the Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen, which records a planting decade rather than a year, so every age on this page is a band and none has been narrowed to look precise. The register is the 2024 edition and is the single source for most of these trees, which is why they are flagged. Three entries we first mapped, the Wilhelminapark elm, a silver lime at the Frater Paullussehof and a Wilhelminapark poplar, were taken off after the register itself marked them felled. It is also why the Heuvel lime is not on this page: the register still carries an entry for a lime on the Heuvel with a planting band of 1600 to 1700, and that tree has been gone since 1994. We checked it rather than publishing it, and that check is the reason to treat every old register entry as a claim rather than a fact. If you go to one of these and find it has gone the same way, tell us and it comes off the same day. Pins marked approximate mean we know the park and not the trunk.
One of Tilburg's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest.