The White Horse Chestnut of the Boogjes Courtyard

To reach this one you walk through a building. The chestnut stands in a shared garden in the middle of a city block with no street frontage at all, and the register locates it the only way it can, by naming the five streets that box it in: Boogjes, Ruitenstraat, Voorstraat, Botgensstraat and Kleine Spuistraat. A passage off one of them is the way in. It was planted between 1880 and 1890, which makes it roughly 136 to 146 years old, and it belongs to the municipality rather than to any of the houses around it, which is why the register marks it as one you may visit. Aerial photography shows the block interior as a real garden rather than a yard: mature trees, and what looks like a small pond among them. Dordrecht has at least three old horse chestnuts that get mistaken for each other, and it is worth being clear which this is. Not the one at the Willem Kes Plantsoen by the Kunstmin theatre, nearly two kilometres away. Not the 1830 chestnut that was picked up and moved eighty metres during the Koningstunnel works in the 1990s, which the local tree society still walks people past. This is the courtyard one, out of sight from every street that surrounds it.