The Bute Park Sweet Chestnut

Bute Park holds more than 3,000 catalogued trees and 50 British champions, and it took until 2023 for anyone to formally record this sweet chestnut as a veteran. Volunteers from Coed Caerdydd and Coed Cadw, the Woodland Trust in Wales, measured it during Ancient Tree Inventory training days that year, with park staff member Nigel Pugh running the tape around the trunk: 4.7 metres. One of the most thoroughly surveyed municipal parks in Britain had a tree that size sitting outside its own records. Sweet chestnut is not a British native. It came from the Mediterranean and went into estate grounds for its nuts, its timber and its looks, and old ones give themselves away: the bark twists into long spirals up the trunk as the tree ages, so a veteran looks as though someone has wrung it out. This one grows in the park immediately behind Cardiff Castle, free and open daily, on ground the city has had the run of for generations. Two things we cannot give you. Nobody has dated it, so its age is not estimated but simply unrecorded, and the 4.7 metres remains the only hard number published about it. And nobody has said where in the park's 56 hectares it stands, so the pin marks the park rather than the trunk. If you find it, tell us where it is.