The Anne Frank Chestnut

The tree this one was cut from no longer exists. On 20 June 2007 a young horse chestnut went into the ground in a small garden off Impasse Berthaud, grown as a graft from the chestnut behind the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, the one Anne Frank could see from the attic window and wrote about in her diary. That original was already failing when the graft was taken, hollowed by fungus and moth damage and propped up with a steel frame. In August 2010 a storm brought it down. The Paris tree had been growing for three years by then. The Ville de Paris classes it an arbre remarquable, a register otherwise filled with giants and centenarians. This one is on it for what it stands for rather than what it measures, which the classification explicitly allows. The measurements are modest and do not entirely agree: the register records 100 centimetres around the trunk, an earlier account gives 72, and the gap is roughly what a vigorous young chestnut puts on in a decade. Mayor Bertrand Delanoe planted it alongside Hans Westra, then director of the Anne Frank House. The garden opened the same year, on the grounds of the seventeenth-century Hotel de Saint-Aignan, and at its entrance are inscribed the names of the 11,000 Jewish children deported from France. Nineteen years in, it is still a slim tree with a long job ahead of it.