The Bernhard Chestnut of the Hilvertsweg

At the fork of the Hilvertsweg and the Bosdrift stand two trees and two boulders, and the inscriptions on the boulders have worn down to almost nothing. The register explains them: a horse chestnut and a lime, planted in 1937 for the marriage of Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard. This is the chestnut, the Bernhard tree, roughly 90 years old on the register's dating, and the register is the only record we have found of it. Horse chestnut was an odd choice for a royal wedding if anyone was thinking long term. It is a Balkan mountain tree, spectacular for two weeks and structurally unserious for the rest of the year: soft wood, shallow roots, limbs that fail without much warning, and since the 1990s a leaf miner moth that turns the foliage brown by August across northern Europe. What it does have is May. The flowers stand up in white candles all over the crown, thousands of them, each with a yellow blotch that turns red once the flower has been pollinated so that bees stop wasting visits on it. Then in September the conkers come down and the children take them. Bernhard died in 2004. The tree has outlived him by two decades and is still holding the corner.