The Horse Chestnut of Kirchtruderinger Straße

If you find this chestnut brown and blotched in August, autumn has nothing to do with it. Since the 1990s a small moth, the horse chestnut leaf miner, has spread across central Europe and mines the leaves of nearly every chestnut on the continent, browning them weeks early. The tree survives it and keeps flowering; it simply stops looking its best at the exact moment people are out in shirtsleeves. Come in May instead, when the candles are up and the leaf miners have not yet got going. What brought it onto Munich's protected list is bulk. The 2021 ordinance calls it a mighty free-standing tree, rare within the city at this size, and free-standing is the operative word: no neighbours, no competition, a full dome from the ground up. It stands on Kirchtruderinger Strasse, the road named for the church end of Trudering, a farming village east of Munich that had its own parish long before the city grew out to meet it and swallowed it whole. The register carries no age and nobody else has published one, which is normal for a street tree that was never famous. Trudering keeps its own local history well. If somebody there knows when this chestnut was planted, we would like to put the year on the page.