The Ottawa Improvement Commission Horse Chestnut

The body that planted this tree was called the Ottawa Improvement Commission, and it was handed sixty thousand dollars a year to make a lumber town look like a capital. It was created in 1899 and it is the ancestor of today's National Capital Commission. Its early planting leaned on the Central Experimental Farm across town, whose arboretum had gone from 200 trees in 1889 to 3,000 by 1899 and could supply stock by the wagonload. The capital's tree register puts this horse chestnut in those first years, likely planted circa 1900. Likely and circa are the register's own words and they stay: no second source names this particular tree. Call it roughly 125 years old and treat the year as approximate. It is not a chestnut and it is not from anywhere near here. Aesculus hippocastanum grows wild in a few mountain valleys in the Balkans and was carried across Europe and then North America purely as an avenue tree, for the reason that shows in late May, when the crown fills with upright white flower spikes standing on the branches like candles. The nuts that drop in September are the ones children fight with and nothing eats. It stands at the Sussex Drive end of the Major's Hill Park slope, a few minutes uphill from the two vine-leaved limes.