The Christusboom

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.