The Double Flowered Horsechestnut of Linda Hall Library
United StatesKansas CityRockhill / UMKC area
Approximate location.
This horsechestnut has never dropped a conker, and it never will. 'Baumannii' is the double-flowered form of the common horsechestnut, bred so that the flower doubles its petals and loses the ability to set fruit. What you get in exchange is a longer, heavier bloom and a lawn nobody has to sweep, which is a fair trade unless you are a child collecting conkers. It was planted in 1956, about a hundred feet from the northeast corner of the main library building, and it sits on the Greater Kansas City champion list as 2-4-1, the largest known of its kind in the metro. The library's own survey, taken around 2008, puts the trunk at 91 inches round, 231 centimetres, under a crown 40 feet across. The height is disputed. The library says 54 feet. A Kansas City gardening magazine that visited in 2017 says 80. Nobody has reconciled the two, and the gap is wider than nine years of growth can explain, so the honest answer is somewhere between them, and worth judging with your own neck. Late April into May is when the argument stops mattering. The whole crown goes up in white double candles for two or three weeks, and then nothing falls.
In bloom
late April into May, when the crown fills with double white candles
The Linda Hall Library arboretum, 5109 Cherry Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64110, about 100 feet from the NE corner of the main library buildingYou can recognise it by the flowers, doubled white candles in late April and May, and by the ground under it: this form sets no conkers at all. It stands about a hundred feet off the library's northeast corner.
Free. The Linda Hall Library grounds and arboretum are open to the public dawn to dusk.
Near Rockhill Road on the UMKC-adjacent stretch of Cherry Street; served generally by RideKC bus routes in the area, no single confirmed stop within a short walk.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.