The Horse Chestnut of Parco Ducale

Horse chestnuts are, by the park's own count, one of its three most common old species alongside plane and lime, and this one earned an individual place on Italy's monumental register on its own measurements: 3.70 metres round the trunk. It is a broad, low-crowned tree rather than a tall one, 16 metres against the 47 of the park's tallest plane, which is exactly the shape Aesculus hippocastanum tends toward once it has had a century to fill out. Parco Ducale's chestnuts are old enough that the park's own literature describes bicentenary specimens among them, planted in the waves of restoration that followed the destruction of 1745 and the redesign under Duke Filippo di Borbone from 1749. Spring here means candle-shaped white flower spikes across the park's oldest chestnuts, and by autumn the same trees are dropping conkers onto the paths beneath them, a seasonal cycle Parma's gardeners have watched repeat for two centuries.