The Turkey Oaks of Geertebolwerk

Four Turkey oaks grow together on the old Geertebolwerk bastion, close enough beside the water that the Dutch monumental tree register counts them as one entry rather than four. Two went into the ground around 1835, when Utrecht's medieval defences were being reshaped into public parkland, and two followed around 1870. Two of the four have grown double stemmed from about two metres up, forking into pairs of trunks that make the group read as more than four trees from a distance. Quercus cerris carries a Dutch name that is easier to remember than its Latin one: moseik, moss oak, for the shaggy, mossy cups that hold its acorns, unlike the smooth cups of the native oaks nearby. The register gives the group a shared girth of roughly three and seventy metres and a height of about twenty five, figures that describe the stand rather than any single trunk within it. With planting dates nearly forty years apart, the group's age spans roughly a century and a half to nearly two centuries, and no single figure captures it honestly. They stand in the open, on public gemeente parkland, a fifteen minute walk from Utrecht Centraal.