The Horse Chestnut of Palingstraat

This chestnut and the double-flowered one on Prinsenhof, about 250 metres away, are two different trees carrying the same common name and the same rough age, which is worth saying plainly so nobody mistakes one for the other. Only the national monumental tree register names this one: a white horse chestnut on the public road verge at the junction of Palingstraat and Karel de Grotelaan, planted somewhere in the 1900s, owned and maintained by the municipality. The city's own separate street-tree survey, checked within 25 metres of this spot, records no horse chestnut here at all, only a silver lime from 1920 and a black lime from 1985 a short distance off. That is not evidence the register is wrong, registers and management inventories are compiled differently and do not always list the same trees, but it means this one stands on one source rather than two, and the entry says so honestly. It grows in the Villapark district, the Philips-era garden suburb planted from 1907, on a street corner rather than in a garden, open to anyone walking past.