The Horse Chestnut of Noorderweg

This chestnut made the city's top ten on the strength of one branch. The monumental-green walking route that the gemeente publishes with the Historisch Centrum names ten trees as Leeuwarden's most special, and the entry for this one turns almost entirely on a single zware gesteltak: a heavy, low main limb that leaves the trunk and reaches out over the footpath. You meet it on the far side of the Stedelijk Gymnasium, on the stretch of the Noorderweg between the Noorderbrug and the flower shop Blomke fan Romke. The two sources do not quite agree on when it went in. The brochure says 1899. The national register, which carries it as a witte paardenkastanje by the Noorderbrug, gives a planting band of 1900 to 1910. The disagreement is a year or so wide and settles nothing important: this is a tree from the turn of the twentieth century, so somewhere between 116 and 127 years old. It has been putting that limb out over the path for longer than anyone now walking under it has been alive, through two wars, the arrival of the cars and every set of schoolchildren the gymnasium has sent past. In May the crown goes up in white candles, the low limb included, which is the week to look at the branch that got it listed.