The Fingered Horse Chestnut of Volkspark Räcknitz

This horse chestnut belongs to a variety that normally grows as a shrub, and it is about 20 metres tall. 'Digitata', the fingered-leaf form, has been spreading out of France since 1864. This specimen was grafted onto an ordinary horse chestnut, and above the graft it has gone on to raise a trunk of its own, under a crown about 18 metres wide. It came out of the Reichsgartenschau of 1936, the national garden show Dresden hosted that year, as one of the rare trees the exhibitors left to the city when the show was over. No planting year was written down, so its age of about 90 is counted from the show rather than from a record of the day it went in. In January 1985 Dresden's council made it a natural monument, and it was the only tree from the then district of Dresden-Süd in that resolution. The city's documentation gives its trunk as 3.05 metres round at 0.7 metres up; the German Dendrological Society's list of record trees has it at 3.53 metres at breast height in 2010. It stands in the north-west corner of Volkspark Räcknitz, at the edge of the raised lawn just inside the entrance from Stadtgutstrasse. A garden show lasts a summer. Its shrub that turned into a tree is still here, ninety years on.