Zwolle pulled down its fortifications and made a ring of parks out of the earth, which is why almost every old tree in the city is standing on a seventeenth century rampart. The best of them is a plane on the Potgietersingel: 33.6 metres tall with a trunk 719 centimetres round, which are measured figures rather than estimates. The oldest is a beech in the grounds of a small country house outside town, where Rhijnvis Feith, poet and mayor of Zwolle, spent his free time writing and in 1799 published an ode to the place in 34 verses.
0 of 7 visited in Zwolle
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The Plane of the Potgietersingel
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 175 to 225 years, from the register's planting band of 1800 to 1850 · Potgietersingel
Thirty three point six metres tall, and a trunk seven point one nine metres round. Those are measured numbers, not estimates, which makes this tree the most precisely known thing on this page and one of the largest planes in the Netherlands.
Seven metres of girth means roughly two and a quarter metres of diameter. Four adults with their arms out would not close a circle round it.
It is standing on a defensive earthwork. Zwolle's seventeenth century fortifications were demolished in the nineteenth, as they were in almost every Dutch town, and the earth was reshaped into a ring of singels and parks. So the ground here is made ground, thrown up to stop artillery and then handed to a garden designer, and this plane has had close to two centuries of deep, loose, undisturbed soil that no city street could offer it.
That is most of the explanation for the size. The other part is the species: planes tolerate everything a city can do to them, and given room they simply keep going.
Bark in flaking cream and olive plates, big maple-shaped leaves, and hard bristly seed balls hanging on their stalks all winter.
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2
The Beech of the Boschwijk Avenue
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 225 to 275 years, from the register's planting band of 1750 to 1800 · Boschwijk
In 1799 the mayor of Zwolle published a 34 verse poem about this garden.
Rhijnvis Feith owned Boschwijk, a small country house not far outside the city, and he was one of the best known Dutch poets of his generation as well as a magistrate and mayor. He came out here in his free time specifically to write. 'Ode aan Boschwijk' is the result, and it is about this ground.
The beech is banded 1750 to 1800, which means it was somewhere between a sapling and a young tree while he was writing. It stands on the west side of the beukenloofgang, the beech avenue, which is the feature of the place: two rows planted close so the crowns meet overhead and make a green tunnel.
A beech avenue is a designed effect that takes a century to work and then works forever. It is also a slow-motion contest, because beeches planted that close spend their lives shading each other out, so the ones that survive are the ones that got up fastest.
Go in early May, when the new leaves are still translucent green and the tunnel glows rather than darkens.
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3
The Horse Chestnut of the Park Eekhout
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 165 to 175 years, from the register's planting band of 1850 to 1860 · Eekhout
A horse chestnut that has reached a hundred and seventy years is doing better than most of its kind manage now.
The species has had a bad half century in Europe. Bleeding canker, a bacterial infection that leaves rusty weeping patches on the bark, has killed a large share of mature trees since the 1990s. The horse chestnut leaf miner, a moth whose larvae tunnel between the leaf surfaces, arrived in the Netherlands around 2002 and now browns the foliage of nearly every tree in the country from July onward. The moth does not kill, but a tree that loses its leaves two months early every year for twenty years is a weakened tree.
So an old, big, still standing chestnut is worth registering as the survivor it is.
It stands in the southeast part of the Park Eekhout, on the ring of the old fortifications, banded 1850 to 1860.
Come in the first half of May, before the miner gets going. That is when the tree does the thing it was planted for: hundreds of upright white flower spikes over the whole crown, each one with a yellow throat that turns red once the flower has been pollinated and no longer wants visitors.
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4
The Red Oak of Boschwijk
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Boschwijk
It was planted for one week a year and it delivers.
Red oak is North American, it reached Europe in the seventeenth century, and it was planted across Dutch estates in the nineteenth for a single reason: nothing native here turns that colour. In late October a mature one goes deep scarlet and then rust, and it holds it for a fortnight while the beeches around it are doing their more restrained copper.
The leaves are the easy way to tell it from a native oak. They are much larger, with pointed lobes ending in tiny bristles, where a pedunculate oak has small soft rounded lobes and no bristles anywhere.
This one stands by the drive to number 7 on the west side of Boschwijk, banded 1860 to 1870, so it is a generation younger than the beech in the avenue and belongs to a later phase of planting on the same ground.
The acorns are worth a look too: squat and broad with a shallow saucer of a cup, quite unlike the neat long acorn of a native oak, and they take two years to ripen rather than one.
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5
The Gate Beech of the Park Eekhout
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Eekhout
The register calls these the poortbomen, the gate trees, which is a job description rather than a species.
Planting a pair of matched trees where a path enters a park is one of the oldest moves in the trade. It makes an entrance out of a gap, and it does it without a gate, a wall or a sign. You know you have arrived somewhere because two large trees have agreed to stand opposite each other. On the way out they frame the street.
This beech is one of that pair, banded 1860 to 1870, planted into the park that was made on the city's demolished fortifications.
Beech was the right choice for the role and a slightly cruel one. The species casts denser shade than any other large tree here, so a gate flanked by two of them is genuinely darker than the ground on either side, and stepping through is a change in light as well as in place. That is the effect, and it took a century and a half to mature.
The bark stays smooth and thin all its life, which is why a beech at a park entrance is always the one covered in carved initials.
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6
The Copper Beech by the Fountain
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Van Nahuysplein
A dark tree next to moving water was somebody's decision.
This is a designed pairing and it still works: a copper beech placed to the left of a fountain on a square at the end of the Wilhelminasingel, planted between 1860 and 1870, when the ring of parks on the old fortifications was being finished and the city was arranging its new edges to be looked at.
Purple foliage was a strong colour to have available. Copper beech is a mutation of the common beech, propagated by grafting rather than seed, and in a nineteenth century planting scheme it functioned as the darkest tone on the palette, the thing you put where the composition needed something heavy. Against pale water and spray it does exactly what was intended.
A hundred and sixty years later it is also just a very large tree in the middle of a city, which is worth going to stand under. The canopy on a mature one is dense enough that the ground beneath stays dry in light rain.
In the last week of October it turns from purple to a deep burnt copper and the square changes colour with it.
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7
The Oak of the Kranenburg Cemetery
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 155 to 165 years, from the register's planting band of 1860 to 1870 · Kranenburg
It is in the new section, and it is a century and a half old, which tells you something about the scale a cemetery is planned on.
Burial grounds are the best places in a Dutch city to find big trees, and the reason is mechanical rather than sentimental. The ground is never redeveloped, never dug for services, never paved, never parked on, and nobody is in a hurry. A tree planted at the edge of a cemetery in the 1860s has had the single most stable century and a half available anywhere inside a growing city.
Oaks in particular are a standard choice for the setting, for the obvious reason that they outlast everybody in it several times over. Pedunculate oak routinely reaches four hundred years here, so this one is at roughly a third of its life.
It is easy to identify: acorns on long stalks, and leaves that sit almost directly on the twig with two small lobes clasping back around it.
Go in October. An oak this age in a good mast year covers the ground beneath it, and a quiet cemetery is one of the few places nobody sweeps them up.
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