The Chestnut of Begraafplaats Daalseweg

Four Catholic parishes petitioned Nijmegen's city council in 1884 for permission to open a shared cemetery on the Daalseweg, and the bishop of 's-Hertogenbosch consecrated it the following June. The city architect Jan Jacob Weve designed the grounds around two broad paths crossing at right angles, lined with copper beeches he is himself buried among, and this sweet chestnut grows on the cemetery's west side from roughly the same founding decade. The cemetery closed to new burials in 1948 when a replacement opened elsewhere, and many graves were later cleared for housing, but the grounds survived intact enough to be named a national heritage site in 2002. The cemetery holds a harder history than most: 300 victims of the February 1944 bombing of Nijmegen, a raid that killed roughly 800 people in a single afternoon, were buried here. Sweet chestnut is not native this far north, introduced originally by the Romans for its edible nuts, and this one has stood through the cemetery's whole active life and its decades since as a protected historic ground rather than a working one. It grows in the open, free to visit during normal cemetery hours, a short walk from Julianapark's own commemorative chestnut.