The Horse Chestnut behind Koekenbier

The national register lists this horse chestnut with almost nothing beside it: no planting date, no note on its history, the field left onbekend, unknown. What is fixed is where it stands, about twenty-five metres into the trees behind restaurant Koekenbier, off the Kennemerstraatweg, on the edge of the Alkmaarderhout. The register bands its age at roughly a century and a quarter without saying how that figure was reached, which would put its planting close to the years around 1900 when the landscape architect L.A. Springer rebuilt the park into its present form. That is inference rather than record, and the register does not claim otherwise. A horse chestnut this size has gone through the same year over and over regardless of what got written down: white candle-shaped flower spikes standing through the crown in May, spiked green conkers splitting on the ground by October. None of that is recorded for this particular tree, only for the species in general. It stands roughly a hundred metres from the park's copper beech and about 300 metres from its oldest recorded plane, part of the same walk through the Westerhoutpark. If you know more about it, tell us.