The Horse Chestnut of the Paterstuin

Of the horse chestnuts in the row at the west end of the Paterstuin, only one still grows the way a horse chestnut wants to. The national tree register counts three trees, one in natural form and two pruned into candelabras, and records the rest of the row as dead. The Bomenstichting's Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen bands the row's planting to the decade 1900 to 1910, so it is roughly 116 to 126 years old. It gives one girth for the whole entry, 3.49 metres round at chest height, and a height of 16 metres, without saying which trunk it measured. Read it as the row's figure, not a promise about any one tree. By that girth, nothing on the register is now larger in this garden. An oak and a sycamore nearby were taken off the monumental list in the latest update for their modest size and condition, and a beech, a lime and a weeping ash were felled when the garden was renovated in 2014 and 2015. The Redemptorist fathers laid the garden out after 1868, and it opened as a public park on 16 July 2015. It is still parish ground, open in daylight with the gate closing at dusk, under an agreement that ran to 2025 and that we have not confirmed was renewed. Our pin is the register's point, so look for the row rather than the pin, and tell us if you find the gate shut.