What is the oldest tree in Venlo?
The oldest tree in Venlo is a sweet chestnut on the yard of the Gasthuishof, an old farm on the Ulingshofweg in Tegelen, which the national register places in a planting band of 1810 to 1820, so between about 205 and 215 years old. The farm itself is far older than the tree: it stands near what used to be the border between the duchy of Gelre and the duchy of Gulik, now the boundary between Venlo and Kaldenkirchen in Germany, and the original wooden building was replaced by a stone one in 1654. A second chestnut, on the Vrijbroekweg in Venlo itself, may be older. The register records a passer-by's claim that it predates 1870 and was damaged on one side by a fire in that year, from which it recovered quickly.
Ages here come from the Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen, which records a planting decade rather than a year, so every figure on this page is a band. The register is the 2024 edition and is the single source throughout, so everything is flagged. One entry is flagged for a different reason: the chestnut on the Vrijbroekweg carries an age claim the register itself attributes to an old passer-by, which is hearsay recorded honestly, and the page passes it on the same way rather than laundering it into a fact. The concentration of giant sequoias at Steyl is not a coincidence but it is also not documented in the register beyond the trees themselves, so the connection this page draws between the monasteries and the planting is inference from the addresses. The sequoia at Kasteel Arcen is the one entry here whose pin is approximate: the register places it on the Toernooiveld rather than at a surveyed point, and the castle grounds are large. Everywhere else the register's own coordinate is what the pin uses, which for a street tree on the Sequoiahof or a chestnut on a farmyard is as good as it gets without standing there.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.