The Turkey Oak of the Coehoornsingel

Zwolle's own list of special trees names exactly one Turkey oak in the whole city. This is it. Everything else along the Menno van Coehoornsingel is what a Dutch town plants: limes, beeches, pedunculate oaks. Quercus cerris belongs to southern Europe and Asia Minor, which means somebody chose it deliberately, around 1920 to 1930 by the register's reckoning. The street carries the name of Menno van Coehoorn, the engineer who rebuilt the fortresses of the Dutch Republic against Louis XIV. His earthworks around Zwolle came down in the nineteenth century and the ground was handed to garden designers. This oak went in on that made ground, into a defensive ring that had already been converted into somewhere to walk. The species gives itself away once you know the tells. Leaves cut into deep, irregular, sharply pointed lobes where the native oak is rounded, and buds sitting in a nest of long thin whiskers. The acorn cups wear the same whiskers, which is why the other name for the tree is the mossy-cupped oak. The national register lists it as municipal property, protected for dendrological reasons rather than for size or age, which is an unusually honest entry: it is here because it is rare, not because it is enormous. A naturalist photographed and identified it in June 2026, so it is more than a line in a database.