The Red Horse Chestnuts of the Diakonessenhuis Garden
How do I find it? You can recognise it by the pink flowers in May, where the chestnuts about 30 metres east of it flower white, and by the steel cables anchoring its crown. It stands in the Diaconessenpark courtyard off Noordersingel.
The hospital this chestnut was planted for closed in 1987. The tree stayed. Leeuwarden's Diakonessenhuis was founded in 1879 and the red horse chestnut in its garden went in during the decade that followed, somewhere between 1880 and 1890, which puts it at roughly 135 to 145 years old. It was entered in the national monumental-trees register in 1989, two years after the hospital shut and while the wards around it were being turned into flats. That conversion nearly cost it. The register's own history records the damage done by the building work of the 1990s, in particular a garage entrance dug in beside the neighbouring block, straight through ground the roots had held for a century. The tree carries two crown anchors and a wound in its trunk. Inspectors in 2017 rated its condition reasonable, which for a tree that has been through all that is a decent verdict. The garden it stands in was laid out in 1895 to a Vlaskamp design, and the city's own monumental-green walking route notes that a few of its trees are still here. This is one of them. The register lists three trees under this entry while its own history text describes a single chestnut, so expect one tree, possibly with company. In May the flowers come up pink rather than white, which is the entire point of the hybrid.
- Species
- Red Horse Chestnut (Aesculus x carnea)
- Location
- Diaconessenpark, off Noordersingel (former Diakonessenziekenhuis garden) (Transvaalwijk)
- Access
- Free. Stands in a landscaped courtyard now called Diaconessenpark, inside the 1990s apartment redevelopment of the former Diakonessenhuis hospital grounds. OSM maps this whole courtyard as leisure=park with paved, wheelchair-accessible footways running past the trees and a public bench right beside them, and shows no gate or private-access tag anywhere in the courtyard, only two low (0.6m) garden walls. The LRMB register itself lists this tree as owner=particulier (likely the apartment building's owners' association rather than the municipality) but visitable=ja and visible=ja. Reads as a residential courtyard rather than a destination park, but the paths through it are open.
- Getting there
- About 900 m north of Leeuwarden station, on foot, just off Noordersingel.
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Sources
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