The Horse Chestnut of Overcingel

Nobody is certain whether this is one tree or a bouquet of them. The register calls it a multi-stemmed white horse chestnut, which was a fashionable thing to plant in the 1820s, and then offers the other reading: that the trunk was once cut through at sixty centimetres and grew back from the stump. If that is what happened, this is the thickest single-stemmed horse chestnut in the Netherlands. Either way it sits in the register's ereklasse, the top rank, held by 99 trees in the whole country. It grows on Overcingel, a private estate whose manor house dates from 1777 and whose garden was reworked in 1824 by the landscape architect Lucas Pieter Roodbaard. When the chestnut itself went in is not recorded. The register's planting band is the 1820s, and its inspectors guess it arrived with that redesign because Roodbaard planted chestnuts often. A guess is what it stays. Age is not the first thing you notice. The tree is wide, low and heavy, held together with anchors driven through trunk and crown, with a large cavity on the path side, plates of bark coming loose and bleeding canker at the foot. Its condition has been slipping for about ten years. Only the national register describes this tree. If you know more of its history, tell us.