The White Horse Chestnuts of the Diakonessenhuis Garden

The register does not soften it: the thicker of these two chestnuts has a cavity with a fungal infection and a strong case of bleeding canker, and the condition of both is rated moderate. They are still standing, and they have been standing a while. Both went into the garden of the Diakonessenhuis when the hospital was founded in 1879, or within the decade after it, which puts them at roughly 135 to 145 years. They were entered in the national monumental-trees register in 1989. Between those two dates the hospital closed, its wards became apartments, and the building work of the 1990s dug a garage entrance in beside them. Bleeding canker is the bacterial disease that has been working through Europe's horse chestnuts since the early 2000s, leaving dark sticky streaks down the bark. Trees carry it for years, and some of them come back from it. Neither the register nor anyone else has written these two off. So this is a pair to see now rather than eventually, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about a tree that predates every building around it. They stand about 30 metres east of the courtyard's pink-flowering red chestnut, in a garden laid out in 1895 to a Vlaskamp design and kept, in part, through everything that has happened to this site since.