The Sweet Chestnut of Greenwich Park

Charles II wanted Versailles and settled for Greenwich instead. After taking the throne in 1660, he ordered grand formal avenues cut through the old royal hunting park, hundreds of sweet chestnuts marched up the hill toward the future Royal Observatory in straight French rows. Most of that planting is gone, lost to storms, disease and three and a half centuries of ordinary attrition. This chestnut is one of roughly fifty survivors, and the one among them recognised individually as a Great Tree of London. Its trunk has thickened into something closer to architecture than plant, and it has been pollarded more than once, a pruning technique that resets a tree's internal clock and is a large part of why it is still standing while so many of its neighbours from the same planting are not. Its slowly rotting heartwood, hollow in places, now shelters beetles and fungi that need old deadwood and nowhere else. Every October it drops a carpet of spiny green cases across the grass, food for the park's squirrels and for anyone willing to peel one open. It has stood through the Restoration, two world wars and the digging of anti-aircraft gun pits nearby. Unlike the oak that once stood a short walk from here, it has never stopped growing.