The Uithof Linden

This linden has outlived the entire farming landscape it was planted into. It went into the ground around 1750 on the south side of a farmhouse called de Uithof, following a Dutch custom of the time: plant a linden on a farmhouse's sunniest side and it will shade the house all summer while dropping its leaves in time to let winter light back in. That practical 18th-century logic is most of why lindens are the tree most often found beside old Dutch farms, more common there than any species chosen for beauty alone. The land around this particular farmhouse, once part of a monastery estate called Oostbroek, gave its name centuries later to something nobody planting the tree could have predicted: De Uithof, now Utrecht Science Park, one of the largest university campuses in the Netherlands, built up around the old farm over the second half of the 20th century. The farmhouse itself survives as a listed national monument, a low 17th-century building now surrounded by university faculties and student housing rather than fields. At roughly 275 years old, the linden is one of the oldest Dutch lindens still standing anywhere, having watched a working farm turn into a research campus without ever leaving the spot it was planted for shade.