The Younger Horse Chestnut of the Castle Park

There are two horse chestnuts in these grounds, and on paper the only thing separating them is ten years. This is the younger. The register bands it 1930 to 1940; the other, about fifty metres east, is banded 1920 to 1930. They carry separate entry numbers and separate coordinates, so this is two trees rather than one tree counted twice, which is a thing registers do often enough to be worth checking. The decade matters more here than it usually would. Kasteel Helmond was sold by its last private owner in 1921 and the landscape park around it broke up over the years that followed. The older chestnut's band straddles that sale. This one's does not. Anything planted between 1930 and 1940 went into grounds that had already stopped being anybody's private garden. The species is having a bad century in this country. Bleeding canker has been killing mature trees since the 1990s, and the leaf miner moth browns the foliage of nearly every horse chestnut in the Netherlands from July onward. Which is why May is the month. The flowers stand upright over the whole crown in white candles, for two or three weeks, before anything has gone wrong with the leaves. Only the register records this one. If you get there and it is gone, tell us and it comes off the page.