The Sonsbeek Forest Chestnut

This is the one tree on Arnhem's list you have to go looking for. The national register marks it as not visible from the nearest path, the only one of the Sonsbeek entries carrying that note, so finding it in the woodland north of the Hertenkamp deer park takes a deliberate search rather than a glance in passing. Bring the coordinates. What is out there is a sweet chestnut of about 170 years. The register thinks it was probably planted around 1855, during the campaign that put in a large part of Sonsbeek's beech forest, and it is careful to present that as its own reasoning rather than as a recorded date. A chestnut in a beech planting is an odd survivor. Castanea sativa is a southern European tree the Romans carried north, grown for centuries as much for flour as for timber, and in the Netherlands it sits near the cool edge of what it can manage, fruiting properly only in a warm year. October is when the walk pays off. The spiny burrs split open to two or three brown nuts, and this deep into the forest nobody is competing with you for them. The wood is open and free, no gate and no ticket, about twenty-five minutes on foot from Arnhem Centraal past the deer park. The register is the only source that has recorded this tree, and it gives no girth.