The Square Robert-Brasseur Horse Chestnut

This chestnut forks at about three metres into ten strong branches and goes up from there like a candelabra, throwing a crown some fifteen metres across over a small square opposite the Grand Theatre. It is 23.5 metres tall. Its health is put down in part to where it happens to stand: horse chestnuts are sensitive to the salt thrown at roads in winter, and this one is set back far enough that the run-off does not reach it. It also grows very slowly. The register measured the trunk at 1.30 metres around the year 2000 and 1.37 in 2022, which is seven centimetres in twenty-two years. Read that as a rate rather than an absolute: the sources are inconsistent about whether the figure is the trunk's girth or its diameter, which is the difference between a slim tree and a heavy one. Nobody has dated it. The Grand Ducal regulation that protects Luxembourg's remarkable trees lists it by number, species and section, and the reference books that describe it give measurements without a planting year. It went onto the official list in 2002. If a record of when it was put in exists somewhere, we would like to see it.