The Zwingerstrasse Horse Chestnuts

Heidelberg protects a whole small stand of horse chestnuts here as one object, not a single trunk. The register lists them as Rosskastanien Zwingerstrasse, designated on 3 February 1986, and treats the group as the thing worth keeping. Stand at the corner of the Zwingerstrasse and you take them in at once, which is exactly why they were listed together. They stand a couple of minutes from the Kornmarkt and the bottom station of the castle funicular, on the strip of street that runs under the Schlossberg. Almost everyone who walks up to the castle from the old town passes them, which is the modest sort of witnessing an urban tree does: not events, but everybody. The horse chestnut is not native to Germany either. It came out of the Balkan mountains and spread across Europe through beer gardens and avenues, planted for the dense shade it throws. In early May the flower spikes go up like candles all over the crown, white with a yellow throat that turns red once the flower has been pollinated, which is the tree telling the bees not to bother twice. In autumn the conkers come down on the pavement. Neither the register nor anything else we found gives an age or a girth for these trees, and the coordinate is the register's own rather than a reading taken under them. If you know how old they are, tell us.