The Philips Tree

It has 470 square metres of ground reserved for its roots, in a city centre, next to a football stadium. That is the detail worth knowing: somebody drew a line on a map and decided nothing would ever be built inside it. Anton Philips had the chestnut planted in 1909 in Philipsdorp, the neighbourhood his company was about to build for its workers. The reasoning was not sentimental. Philips believed staff performed better with something green around them, and the tree went in a year before the first houses did. So it is older than the district, older than the stadium beside it, and older than the club that plays there, which the company founded in 1913. The houses went up around it, the ground was cleared for the ground, the stands grew, and the chestnut kept its square. On a match day forty thousand people walk past it and most of them do not look up. Gate 11 is the one to aim for. It is the tree standing in its own patch of open ground while everything else is paving. Horse chestnuts flower in candles in May and drop conkers in September, which in this spot means several thousand people kicking them across a car park.