The Oak of the Kranenburg Cemetery

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.