The Horse Chestnut of the Gasteig

Gasteig comes from gacher Steig, steep path, and that is the whole explanation of this corner of Munich. The ground drops away here to the Isar, so everything on the slope has had to be terraced, buttressed or built into the bank, and the horse chestnut stands at the top of the fall. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it as a striking, wide-spreading tree, particularly effective in the streetscape. Wide-spreading is the phrase worth stopping on. A street chestnut is normally cut back into a lollipop to keep it clear of the trams, the wires and the upper windows, and it spends its life as half a crown. This one has been left to throw its lower limbs out sideways, which is what the species does when nobody interferes. Its neighbour is the Gasteig itself, the concert hall that opened in 1985 as home of the Munich Philharmonic and emptied out in 2021 for a rebuild, the orchestra decamping to a converted industrial hall across the river. The tree stayed where it was. The species is not local either. Aesculus hippocastanum is native to a handful of mountain ravines in Greece and Albania, where it is a threatened tree, and planted by the million everywhere else. No age is recorded here: Munich's ordinance says why a tree is protected and never how old it is.