The Horse Chestnut of St.-Anna-Platz

Munich's beer gardens are chestnut groves for an engineering reason. Brewers dug cellars along the Isar to hold beer through the summer and planted horse chestnuts over them, because the species throws heavy shade from shallow roots that will not force their way into a vault. Then they discovered that people would rather drink under the trees than carry the beer home, and the beer garden existed. This one shades no cellar. It stands at the southwest corner of St.-Anna-Platz in the Lehel, between two churches of very different temperament: the small Klosterkirche finished in 1733, generally counted the first rococo church built in Old Bavaria, and the far larger parish church that went up beside it in the 1890s. Both were gutted by bombing and rebuilt. The 2021 natural monument ordinance protects the tree as platzbildprägend, defining the square, and calls it mighty and healthy. Healthy is the word to notice. Since the 1990s the horse chestnut leaf miner, a moth out of the Balkans, has browned and curled the foliage of chestnuts across Europe by mid July, so a chestnut still carrying green leaves in August is doing better than most of its species. Its age is not on record anywhere. The ordinance gives reasons and no dates, and nothing else has measured this tree.