The Horse Chestnut of the Station Square

Amersfoort's registered horse chestnut stands on the station square itself, which means more people probably walk past this tree on an ordinary Tuesday than pass any other tree on this page in a month. Aesculus hippocastanum is the classic candle-flowered chestnut of European squares and avenues, and this one has done its job in one of the more heavily used public spaces in the city since the 1920s, when the register bands its planting. It has had a harder run than a park tree of the same age: the horse chestnut leaf miner moth, in the Netherlands since around 2002, browns the foliage of nearly every chestnut in the country by late summer, and bleeding canker has killed mature specimens across the region since the 1990s. A century-old chestnut still standing on a station square, with commuters and buses passing under it daily, is a tree that has held up. Free to see, no ticket, right outside Amersfoort's main railway station. Come in the first half of May for the white candle-shaped flower spikes, before the leaf miner starts its usual damage later in the summer.