Ancient Trees Is a Quietly Obsessive App That Turns Tree-Spotting Into a Global Treasure Hunt

A Dutch designer's personal obsession becomes a curated global map of remarkable old trees. Think AllTrails for dendrophiles — small, earnest, and useful.

Hidde Burgmans is a 37-year-old digital designer from Baarn in the Netherlands who proposed to his girlfriend under a cedar in Japan and spends his holidays making detours to visit old trees. He is, by his own admission, obsessed. Ancient Trees is the app that grew out of that obsession — a curated, user-uploaded map of remarkable specimens worldwide, from Malaysian baobabs to the Fortingall yew in Perthshire, Scotland, estimated at 5,000 years old. The origin story is pleasantly unglamorous. Work trips to Lisbon left Burgmans wandering parks full of century-old jacarandas and wild figs. He wanted to find more trees like them. No tool existed, so he built one himself, using his day-job design skills. The editorial principle is deliberately narrow: the tree must be "worth a detour." This is not a botanical census; it is a personal recommendation engine shaped like a map. What makes the app interesting as a cultural object is its curatorial restraint. Burgmans isn't trying to catalogue every tree — the Woodland Trust's Ancient Tree Inventory already covers the UK with scholarly thoroughness. Ancient Trees instead aims for the feel of a traveller's notebook: quirky, personal, global. Users upload photos, descriptions, and add visited trees to their profiles. The social layer is light — closer to a birdwatcher's life list than a social media feed. Dan Crowley, a dendrologist who operates as @thetreespotter on Instagram, positions the app within a broader argument about tree awareness during climate stress. "There's never been a more important time to focus on trees," Crowley said. "A community of people photographing and observing trees through the seasons is how we learn about them." The conservation pitch is real but secondary — the app's energy comes from hobbyist delight, not activism. Burgmans's stated ambition is to become "the AllTrails for tree lovers," with walking routes linking the best trees in each city. That comparison tells you where the app wants to go — from curated map to platform — and also where the tension will arrive. AllTrails succeeded by scaling aggressively; Ancient Trees works precisely because one person with taste is gatekeeping the catalogue. The question is whether that curatorial voice survives growth. The early traction is modest but genuinely international: five trees photographed in Paris on Monday, one in Edinburgh on Tuesday, one in Freiburg the next day. That quiet rhythm — a few contributions trickling in from different cities each day — is the product's most charming quality and also its biggest vulnerability. Community-driven curation apps either reach critical mass or stall as novelty fades. As a piece of design thinking, Ancient Trees is a clean execution of a very specific insight: people who love old trees have no digital home, and the right product for them is a map, not a feed. Whether it becomes a durable tool or remains a lovely side project depends entirely on whether enough people share Burgmans's particular obsession — and the early signs suggest more do than he expected.