The Twin Planes of the Stadhuis

In 2018 a growth-site study commissioned by the municipality reached a conclusion about one of these two plane trees: it could not be sustainably preserved through the rebuilding of Tilburg's town hall. It was one of some forty trees on the site marked to come down, and the objection that followed was loud and public. The work ran until February 2021. Two months after it finished, a dated account from the Stadhuisplein described what was standing there: two plane trees, both dating from around 1850, both still on the municipality's monumental tree list, at the old palace-town hall. So the best evidence is that the tree service's own worry did not come true and the pair came through the building work. What we cannot do is prove it for today. Nothing we found from 2022 onward counts the trees at this spot, so if you walk past and there is one where this page says two, tell us and the entry gets corrected. The national register treats the pair as one entry, two trees at a single point, which is also how they read on the ground: two trunks, one place to stand, behind the oldest wing of the Stadhuis. It dates the planting to between 1860 and 1870. The 2018 study called them about 170 years old. The 2021 account put them at around 1850. Three estimates agreeing to within about twenty years, and not one of them made by anybody who was there.