The Blaise Meadow Sweet Chestnut

If the Bristol Tree Forum's estimate is right, this chestnut was already around 300 years old when Humphry Repton came to Blaise to design the parkland. The Forum puts it at about 550 years, with a trunk seven metres round, and describes its vast horizontal branches reaching out across the meadow off Henbury Road. That age is the Forum's own figure, worked out from a tree nobody has dated, and we have found no second written source for this particular chestnut. A girth of seven metres is in keeping with a sweet chestnut several centuries old, but treat 550 as an estimate. On the Forum's figure it would have been growing here through the late medieval centuries, the Civil War, and the years after 1789, when the banker John Scandrett Harford bought the estate and had Repton reshape the grounds into the Picturesque park that is now free for anyone to walk. The chestnut does not have the meadow to itself, and its neighbours are part of the reason to come. The Forum lists a sycamore beside it that grows on five trunks, each about 2.8 metres round and seven metres around all together, and the stump of an old common lime that has rotted down and thrown up a thicket of thin new trunks from its base. Three trees in one field, each refusing to grow the way a tree in a textbook does. If you know more about its history, tell us.