Anne Frank could see one tree from the annex, and this is its child. Chestnuts from that Amsterdam horse chestnut were raised into saplings, eleven of which were planted in the United States, one of them here. The parent, roughly 150 to 170 years old, came down in a storm in August 2010, so this graft has now outlived the tree it came from. Nothing about its size or age argues for the trip. It reached Boise around October 2009 at about three feet tall and had to sit out roughly two years of quarantine in a city nursery before it could go in the ground. Nobody has published a firm planting date, so we date it loosely, somewhere between eleven and fifteen years old. If you know the year it went in, tell us. The lineage is the whole case, and the company it keeps says what the distributors thought they were doing: the other American recipients include the White House, the 9/11 Memorial in New York and Central High School in Little Rock. It grows on a grassy berm behind a low iron fence, ringed with pink roses, across from the plaza where a bronze Anne Frank stands at a window looking out. The memorial is free and open dawn to dusk, every day of the year.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, 770 S 8th St, Boise, Idaho 83702 (also cited as 800 S 8th St by the City of Boise's own page; the memorial address is disputed between two of its own official pages, not between our sources and a third party)
You can recognise it by the low iron fence and the ring of pink roses around it, and by its size: a young chestnut, not a big one. It stands on the grassy berm across from the plaza with the bronze statue of Anne Frank at her window.
Free, public memorial and park. Open year-round, seven days a week, dawn to dusk (Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, which co-maintains the site with the City of Boise). No admission fee; guided tours available with 48 hours' notice.
Downtown Boise, near Boise State University and the Boise River Greenbelt; walkable from downtown.
In bloomIn fruit
May, when it flowers
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.