The Boom van Lücker

In 1924 an art teacher bought a chestnut tree with the money from a print he had made of it. The tree here now is not that one, and the difference is the whole story. Eugene Lucker's chestnut had germinated on this spot somewhere between 1770 and 1794, sources differ, and by the 1920s workmen had arrived to fell it. Lucker and Jonkheer van der Goes van Naters, later a parliamentary leader for the Dutch labour party, stopped them, raised a hundred guilders by selling Lucker's own linocut of the tree, and bought it outright. They founded the Nijmeegsche Vereeniging voor Natuurschoon the same day, and organised nature conservation in Nijmegen begins there. That chestnut sickened and came down in 1996, fourteen metres tall and three metres round. The association dissolved the same year and sold the ground to the city for one guilder. The city kept the promise attached to it: in 2000 the artist Diane Dyckhoff planted a young sweet chestnut diagonally across the street and set it inside a circle of steel rings and blue gravel, the rings standing in for growth rings this tree has not grown yet. So you walk to a tree of about twenty-five years on an address that has carried a chestnut since the 1700s, minus the four years in between. A round plaque in the pavement marks the old one's spot. The young one is about ten metres further on, past the Broerweg junction, right side heading out of town.