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.
In bloomIn fruit
May, when the candles are up
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Frederiklaan 10a, on the square at gate 11 of the Philips StadiumThe only large chestnut on the stadium square, standing in a marked open bed of its own rather than in paving.
Free. Public square outside the stadium, reachable at any time.
Eindhoven Centraal, then about 15 minutes on foot west, or bus to Philips Stadion.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen (Bomenstichting), no. 1690641
- monumentalebomen.nl
- trefpuntgroeneindhoven.nl
- nl.wikipedia.org
- services-eu1.arcgis.com