The Sweet Chestnut of the Stadspaviljoen

Two registers place this chestnut within eighty centimetres of each other and disagree about its age by fifty years. The national register bands the planting 1890 to 1900. Eindhoven's own tree database says 1940. The position is settled and the age is not, which is the usual shape of these things: somebody once stood under the tree with a GPS, and nobody ever counted anything. The species is not in dispute. A sweet chestnut in a Dutch park is a food tree that stopped being used as one. Castanea sativa came north with the Romans, who ground the nuts into flour, and it fed people across southern Europe for centuries afterwards. This one reaches fifteen to eighteen metres, hangs cream catkins in July, and in October drops spiny burrs into the grass, where the squirrels reach them first. It stands behind the Stadspaviljoen, a few dozen metres from the honey locust, which makes the pair one short walk rather than two separate errands. The pavilion was the coach house of Landgoed Den Elzent, a private country estate on the edge of town until Eindhoven opened the grounds to the public in 1921. The trees in this corner are a set rather than a scatter: beeches, pin oaks and black locusts, all of them monumental in the city's records, dated by the city to 1910 and 1940.