Philemon
Approximate location. Show us where it is
How do I find it? You can recognise it by being the multi-stemmed oak still standing where its storm-felled partner Baucis once grew, 6 metres round and 23 metres tall. It stands beside Hotel Beekhuizen on the Ommetje Beekhuizen route, Velp.
Storms do not read the names. Philemon and Baucis were a pair of ancient oaks on the old Beekhuizen estate, named for Ovid's elderly couple who were turned into an oak and a linden. Storm Ciaran took Baucis at the end of 2023 and left Philemon standing alone. The reply took two years. On 8 December 2025 a sapling grown from one of Baucis's own acorns, kept since 2020 by Joris Hellevoort of the Bomenstichting, was planted almost on the spot where it had stood, and fenced against wildlife. Two local papers turned out for it. Philemon is the older business. Multi-stemmed, about six metres round and 23 metres tall, it is put at 300 to 500 years old, which the register brackets as a planting somewhere between 1520 and 1720. Nobody has dated it more closely. The pair is first mentioned in writing in 1820, and the site appears in a Gelders Archief photograph from the 1930s or 1940s. It is among the oldest trees in the municipality of Rheden. One honest note. No source says in so many words that Philemon still stands. Every account since the storm is about Baucis, none of them mentions a second loss, and bomenbieb still lists Philemon as alive. If you get there and find otherwise, tell us. It sits on public estate ground beside Hotel Beekhuizen, on the signed Ommetje Beekhuizen, free.
- Species
- Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur)
- Girth
- 6 m
- Location
- Former Beekhuizen estate, between Hotel Beekhuizen and the path down to the Beekhuizerbeek waterfall, Velp (Velp, Rheden, Gelderland)
- Access
- Free. Public grounds of the former Beekhuizen estate (part of Nationaal Park Veluwezoom), on the signed 'Ommetje Beekhuizen' walking route beside Hotel Beekhuizen.
- Getting there
- From Velp or Arnhem, bus toward Rozendaal/Beekhuizen, then a short walk on the estate paths.
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
Discover more
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
Correct a detail on this pageSuggest another tree