The Horse Chestnut of the Waterwolf

There is a lake under this tree. Until 1852 the Haarlemmermeer covered everything you can see from here, wide enough to frighten Amsterdam and hungry enough at the edges to have earned the name Waterwolf. Three steam pumping engines emptied it over three years, and the lake floor they laid bare sits roughly four metres below sea level. That is the ground this horse chestnut is rooted in. The register puts its planting between 1910 and 1920, which makes it about 110 years old, and out here that counts as old: no tree anywhere in the polder can predate the drainage, so the oldest possible tree in the Haarlemmermeer is younger than most of the houses in Haarlem. Aircraft climb out of the same lake bed a few kilometres north. It stands on the west side of the Hoofdweg, the road that runs the length of the Hoofdvaart, the canal cut dead straight through the middle of the drained lake. This stretch is still farmland, and the tree has the shape a chestnut gets when nothing has ever crowded it: low, wide, branching almost from the ground, the candles in May starting at head height. Nobody wrote down who planted it. The register's history field for this tree is blank, and it is the only source that describes it at all. If it once belonged to a farm along this road, tell us.