Vandals tried to burn the largest tree (or at least the one with the biggest girth) in the Netherlands last Tuesday The tree, a chestnut, has a girth of about 26 ft and while it's possible for sweet chestnuts to reach a girth like that in less than 300 years, it may be as much as 450 years old. It's called the 'Kabouterboom' or 'gnome tree' and is a tourist attraction in the area. It's also hollow, so a fire lit inside the tree can easily damage it. The fire department managed to extinguish the fire but there's a lot of damage; it won't be known until May whether it survives or has basically been 'cooked' from the inside. There seem to have been smaller fires and it was also damaged in the second world war by artillery shells, but it has/had up til now survived. The previous fires lit inside had been smaller than tuesday's, though. Sometimes I just hate people... what the hell did the tree ever do to them? Why do people think it's amusing to damage anything that is old or beautiful? I hope they will at least find the asshats who did this, and that the tree will live through this...
That's terrible, I can't imagine how anybody could bring themselves to do something so awful. Harming trees is terribly wrong... makes me sad.
where goes the beautiful nature, man? Not much free nature left in Holland becasue it's all structurized and highways all over the place....and then the little pure things get wasted..... Where in holland is the tree actually?
I'm sure I've gotten a couple of the details mixed up, but in a National Park in California or Arizona (possibley New Mexico), there is a grove (I believe but could be wrong) of Sequoria (sp?) trees. These trees on the average are about 5,000 years old. The oldest tree of them is about 11 to 12 thousand years old. These trees are amongst the oldest living things on earth. Because some people prefer to behave like brainless idiots the National Park service keeps the exact location of these trees a secret. I've seen pictures of these trees, they resemble ugly narly old bushes.
It's in Beek, near Nijmegen. There's a website with some info on http://vossen.xs4all.nl/bsz/jpa/kabouterboom.htm and a picture (not specifically of the fire or fire damage). The picture below is taken in England -sure, we're just a small country with pretty small trees Still ours looks quite cool, I'll probably go see in May when all trees start to bud and see if it's still alive...
