The Wodanseiken

A circle of nineteenth-century landscape painters used to walk out to these oaks at night, and it was they who named them after a god. Johannes Warnardus and Gerard Bilders, of the Oosterbeekse School, were coming here by around 1850. J.J. Cremer had already painted the trees in 1849, and the name Wodanseiken, after Wodan, is first recorded in writing in 1865. The oaks are older than that by centuries. Both sources that date them agree they came up shortly after the Wolfhezerbeek was dug as a stream channel in 1550, which puts them somewhere between 400 and 600 years old. nl.wikipedia gives that range, bomenbieb narrows it to 450 to 500, and neither figure rests on a documented planting, so the broad version is the honest one. The largest of the group measures 5.25 metres round and stands 22 metres tall. They grew up on open heathland along the stream. Mixed forest has closed in around them since, and not all of the original trees are still there: groundwater beneath the Wolfhezerheide has fallen a metre or two over the last century through water extraction, and a number of the oaks died. The reserve belongs to Natuurmonumenten and costs nothing. The signed Wodanroute is built around the trees, about five minutes in from the parking area on the Oude Kloosterweg.