Ypres has no ancient trees, and the reason is the reason people come here. The town and the country around it were shelled to rubble between 1914 and 1918, and the trees went with everything else. What grows here now was put here deliberately: limes planted as peace trees and liberty trees straight after the armistice, an oak on a golf course reduced to a stump twice by two wars and regrown both times, and a chestnut by the Menin Gate that did the same, coming back as four trunks instead of one.
0 of 5 visited in Ypres
Oak (Quercus sp.) · Hollebeke (Ieper)
Two wars cut this oak down to nothing, and it grew back from the stump both times. It was planted around 1830, when the park around Kasteel Mahieu was laid out; the castle itself is long demolished. The First World War stripped the site bare and the tree resprouted after the armistice. In May 1940, during the British retreat to Dunkirk, it was hit again and left as a stump about the height of a man, and it resprouted a second time into the shape it holds now.
People read that shape as a crucified figure, and they have made the reading explicit. Nails have been driven into the wood, a white ribbon tied across it to sharpen the outline, and memorial plaques added at the foot. Flanders' heritage inventory files it as a spijkerboom, a nail tree, which is a known Belgian custom. Local tradition holds that two Scottish soldiers killed in 1940 were buried here, and a simple cross marks where the grave was.
Nobody has aged the living wood, and nobody should. Whatever the date of the planting, what stands today is at most 85 years of regrowth off a stump.
The oak sits at the edge of a golf course, and a public foot path crosses the course and passes about twenty metres from it. You do not need to be a member, only to stay on the path and let the golfers play through.
Lime (Tilia sp.) · 105 years · Voormezele (Ieper)
A slab of white marble at the foot of this lime reads Vryheidsboom 1918-1968, and that inscription is the only thing dating the tree. The village set the plaque in 1968, fifty years after the armistice, and the 1918 names the year the tree belongs to rather than a day anybody wrote down. So call it roughly 105 years and leave the number loose, because no source will do better.
It stands in the churchyard of Onze-Lieve-Vrouwkerk in Voormezele, a village four kilometres southwest of Ieper, among a small crowd of things marking the same few years: a British war grave, memorial stones for the civilian and military dead, a Japanese peace pole nearby. Planting a liberty tree is an old European habit, marking a political turn with something living instead of another block of stone.
It is worth being plain about what this tree is, because in this landscape the assumption runs the other way. It did not survive the war. The church behind it was rebuilt afterwards like everything else here, and the lime went into ground the shelling had already cleared. That is exactly what makes it the oldest tree in Ypres: it starts at the moment the shelling stopped.
If you have stood under it lately, tell us how it is doing.
Lime (Tilia sp.) · Vlamertinge (Ieper)
The peace tree on this square is not the peace tree. The original went in on 30 November 1919, behind the wayside cross on the Sixplein in front of Vlamertinge's town hall, and what grows in its place today is a young lime of no recorded age.
The 1919 planting is documented twice, which is more than most things around here manage. Flanders' heritage inventory records it, citing the newspaper De Poperinghenaar of 7 December 1919, a week after the event, and the municipal heritage trail records it separately. It was a village gesture rather than a state one: a vredesboom, a peace tree, marking Belgium's liberation, put in behind the calvary where the whole village walked past it.
At some point the first tree went. The inventory says only that the one standing now was planted comparatively recently, in the same spot, behind the same cross, and gives no date at all for the replanting. So the age here belongs to the place and not to the wood, and the honest description is a young lime holding a spot a village chose in 1919.
If you know when the replacement went in, or remember the tree before it, that is exactly the sort of thing we would like to be told.
Lime (Tilia sp.) · Boezinge (Ieper)
Three limes at a farm gate in Boezinge are cut into candelabra, and somebody is still doing the cutting. Leiboom pruning means training a tree flat and holding it to a frame year after year; leave it a decade and the shape is gone for good. These three are being kept up, which is the fact worth the detour.
They stand either side of a rustic concrete cross carrying a figure of Christ, at the hofgat, the gated entrance to a working farm on Ravestraat. Flanders' heritage inventory files them under two headings at once, welkomstboom, a tree planted to be seen by whoever is arriving, and kapelboom, a shrine tree, and both are right. This is a small roadside shrine using trees as its architecture.
What nobody has recorded is anything else. No planting date, no girth, no age. The inventory describes the shape and the cross and stops there, which leaves this entry thin on history and unusually clear about what you actually see.
You look from the road. Ravestraat is an ordinary public road and the trees and the cross stand at the farm's frontage; the yard past the gate is private and stays that way. If anyone knows when these three went in, we would like to hear it.
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · Vestingen / Menin Gate, Ieper
This chestnut was cut to a stump by shelling in the First World War, and what grew back from the surviving roots was not one trunk but four. The site was planted around 1860, when Ieper's old fortifications became a public promenade, but the town was shelled flat between 1914 and 1918 and the tree went down with everything else. The four trunks standing today are regrowth off that stump, fused at a base that now measures nine metres round.
The second death sentence came in 1940. Wartime fuel shortages sent people across Ieper looking for firewood, and a four-trunked chestnut on a slope above the Menin Gate was an obvious target. It was spared, per the city's own account, because felling it risked dropping trunk onto the houses on the slope below. It is reported to be one of only two Ieper trees to have lived through both wars on the same spot.
None of this makes it an old tree. Whatever survives from 1860 is root rather than wood, and the trunks above ground are at most as old as the armistice that let them grow. What makes it worth the stop is what it has already outlived twice, on a walking route the city has built an audio guide around, minutes from the Menin Gate.
It won Belgium's own Tree of the Year in 2020, then placed twelfth at the 2021 European final with nearly 31,000 votes.