The Chestnut of Kontumazgarten

This park was a quarantine station. Kontumaz is the old German word for it, and the ground here is where Nuremberg held arriving travellers and goods until the city was satisfied they carried nothing worse than themselves. It is a lawn and a playground now, and this chestnut is protected on it as ND-6 under the city's 2020 natural monument ordinance. The ordinance calls it Kastanie and leaves it there, chestnut, without saying which kind. In a planted German municipal park an unqualified Kastanie is almost always the horse chestnut rather than the sweet chestnut, so that is what this page records, on inference rather than on anyone's botanical word. No source gives it an age either. What the register does confirm is that in 2020 the city still counted it worth protecting by name, which is the most recent thing anyone has published about this tree. Come in May. Horse chestnuts flower by putting up hundreds of white candles at once, upright over the entire crown, and a mature one doing that above a children's playground is the best ten days this park has all year. By late September it is dropping conkers in spiny green cases that split open on the ground, which is the other reason children have always known this species better than adults do.