The Sessile Oak of the Korvelplein

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.