The Horse Chestnut of the Castle Park

A horse chestnut in a castle park is a tree planted for children, whether or not anyone admitted it at the time. The conkers are the point. They ripen in September, the spiny green cases split on the ground, and what falls out is the glossiest object in northern European botany, a deep mahogany brown that fades within days of being picked up. Every generation discovers this independently at about the age of six. This one is banded 1920 to 1930, so it went in just after the castle was sold in 1921 and the private landscape park began to break up. Planting a chestnut at that moment, in grounds that were becoming public, reads like somebody thinking about the town rather than about a garden. The species is having a hard century. Bleeding canker has killed many mature trees since the 1990s, and the leaf miner moth, here since about 2002, browns the foliage of nearly every horse chestnut in the country from July onward. So come in early May for the white candles, before the miner starts, or in September for the conkers. Not August.