The Oriental Plane of the Abraham Dolehof

The largest thing in this old convent garden is younger than the garden by more than four centuries. Abraham Dole and his wife Christina founded the Sint-Ursula nunnery here in 1412; it was dissolved in 1580, and the walled courtyard it left behind now holds an Oriental plane more than four metres round and about 25 metres tall. It is the true Oriental plane, not the London hybrid planted along so many Dutch streets, and the difference shows in the leaves, cut deep into narrow lobes. The trunk is covered in harmless burrs the local guides call warts, under bark that peels away in a brown and green mottle. The seed balls hang in clusters of three to six. Its age rests on two readings that meet. The national monumental tree register puts its planting between 1840 and 1850, and a 2018 article in DUIC called it roughly 170 years old, which points to about 1848. That makes it around 180 now. From beneath its crown you can see the Lutheran church, a clandestine church built after the Reformation to pass for an ordinary house. The residents who live around the courtyard look after the garden themselves. The gate on Lange Nieuwstraat is open by day and locked in the evening, and from the street you cannot see the tree at all, which is a fair part of its charm: you have to walk in to find it.