The Horse Chestnut of the Prinsentuin

This tree is almost exactly as old as the idea of a public park in this country. Between 1822 and 1824 the city had a new garden laid out on the northern fortifications, in the existing grounds, by Lucas Pieters Roodbaard, the Frisian garden architect who spent his career converting Dutch formality into the romantic English manner: curved paths, water, planned views, no straight lines. It has been open to the public ever since, which makes the Prinsentuin one of the first public walking parks in the Netherlands and this chestnut one of the original plantings. Two hundred years of people walking under a tree is not neutral. Horse chestnuts suffer badly from compacted ground and this one has had two centuries of feet. It is also the species now under attack across Europe from the leaf miner moth, which browns the foliage from July onward and makes a mature chestnut look half dead by August without actually killing it. So come in May, when it is at its unarguable best: white candles held upright all over the crown, in a park laid out by a man who would have chosen it for exactly that. It stands beside the Historisch Centrum, on the Groeneweg side.