The trunk you are looking at carries on about two metres below your feet.
Horse Chestnut
Every conker in Europe descends from a handful of mountain ravines in northern Greece, Albania and North Macedonia, the only places the horse chestnut still grows wild and where it is now classed as vulnerable. This page maps every horse chestnut on the site, 56 so far across 38 cities.
Everywhere else it is a planted tree, and cities planted it hard. Vienna lined its grandest avenue with chestnuts from 1840. Munich's brewers put them over their beer cellars, because the species throws heavy shade from shallow roots that will not force their way into a vault, and the beer garden followed from there. Geneva went further than anyone: since 1818 an official has walked to a designated chestnut each spring, recorded the date its first leaf opens and reported it to the press, which makes one of the longest continuous records of its kind anywhere. Seventeen are mapped, in fifteen cities, and not one of them is anywhere near the wild population.
Amsterdam
Rome
Photo: Albarubescens (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A Balkan mountain tree has no business being this large on a Roman hill.
Barcelona
The horse chestnut in Placa de Carles Buigas went into the ground around 1937, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, in a city then still held by the Republic.
Barcelona's register of trees of local interest runs past two hundred entries and contains exactly one horse chestnut.
Vienna
Vienna's grandest avenue is older than the trees that define it by two centuries.
Paris
The best-known figure for this chestnut is forty centimetres out of date.
There is a river under this garden.
The tree this one was cut from no longer exists.
Brussels
Photo: Sam.Donvil (CC BY-SA 4.0)
When Brussels built Parc du Cinquantenaire in 1880 to mark Belgium's fiftieth year as a country, it cheated on the trees.
The horse chestnut is one of the most planted trees in Europe and one of the rarest in the wild.
Nijmegen
A parish square in Lent doubles as a chestnut's front garden.
This chestnut has a birthday on record: 4 September 1948, the day Juliana became Queen of the Netherlands after her mother Wilhelmina's abdication.
Nijmegen's own city register and the national monumental tree register agree on almost nothing about this horse chestnut except where it stands.
Porto
Every conker in Europe descends from a handful of mountain ravines in Greece and Albania, the only places the horse chestnut still grows wild, and where the species is now classed as vulnerable.
The Hague
Photo: WeeJeeVee (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Up to a hundred stamp collectors at a time used to crowd around this horse chestnut on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, trading and selling postage stamps under its branches for decades before th...
In March 1997 this horse chestnut was dragged eighty metres across the Koekamp on steel plates, with a hundred tonnes of soil still around its roots, and the operation went into the Guinness Book o...
A ruined medieval chapel stands a few steps from this chestnut and is six centuries older than anything else growing on the site.
The Vijverberg exists because of a hole in the ground.
When a Dutch horse chestnut looks scorched in August, the summer is not to blame.
Groningen
The Prinsentuin has been walled off from the rest of Groningen since 1626, when it was laid out as a private pleasure garden for the region's stadholders, and the wall is still what makes it feel l...
When Groningen redeveloped the Akerkhof a few years ago to fix a square that had gone dark, dry and unloved, the plan called for cutting three trees and clearing scrub around the church to let ligh...
Leiden
At 5.8 metres round, this is the thickest horse chestnut in the Netherlands by the national monumental tree register's own measurement.
Geneva
Photo: MHM55 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Geneva has kept an unbroken written record of a chestnut tree's first spring leaf since 1818, one of the oldest continuous phenology datasets anywhere, third-oldest in the world by the canton's own...
Trieste
Two horse chestnuts stand thirty metres apart in this garden and the register measured both at exactly 335 centimetres of girth and exactly twenty-three metres of height.
Munich
Munich's beer gardens are chestnut groves for an engineering reason.
Gasteig comes from gacher Steig, steep path, and that is the whole explanation of this corner of Munich.
The word Munich's ordinance uses for this tree is Solitär, which in the trade means a tree with open ground on every side and therefore the shape the species actually has.
Munich's beer gardens are shaded by this species for an engineering reason.
If you find this chestnut brown and blotched in August, autumn has nothing to do with it.
Utrecht
The interesting thing about an old horse chestnut in the Netherlands is that it is still there.
Lyon
Most visitors to this park come for the wildness rather than any single tree, but the chestnut at its centre is the reason locals bother naming the place at all.
This chestnut is not old.
Delft
Five horse chestnuts on Sint Agathaplein, three white-flowered and two red, have stood outside the building where William of Orange was shot dead since 1920, planted as part of a coordinated square...
Brno
A car park nearly wrote the end of this chestnut's story.
Den Bosch
Five horse chestnuts stand within sixty metres of each other along this stretch of the Casinotuin, and this is the thickest by a clear margin: four metres round against roughly three and a half for...
Bilbao
In a park stocked with trees from five continents, the specimen the guides keep naming is a horse chestnut.
Granada
The wooded hillside visitors climb to reach the Alhambra did not exist when the fortress was still in Muslim hands.
Parma
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 me...
Eindhoven
It has 470 square metres of ground reserved for its roots, in a city centre, next to a football stadium.
Helmond
A horse chestnut in a castle park is a tree planted for children, whether or not anyone admitted it at the time.
Leeuwarden
This tree is almost exactly as old as the idea of a public park in this country.
Zwolle
A horse chestnut that has reached a hundred and seventy years is doing better than most of its kind manage now.
Assen
Nobody is certain whether this is one tree or a bouquet of them.
Bergamo
Torre Boldone had two comune-protected giants until 2017, when the Cedar of Lebanon in Parco dei Sordomuti was illegally felled.
Como
The church beside it is a thousand years old, and the tree cannot be, because the species had not arrived yet.
Haarlemmermeer
There is a lake under this tree.
Hilversum
At the fork of the Hilvertsweg and the Bosdrift stand two trees and two boulders, and the inscriptions on the boulders have worn down to almost nothing.
Hoorn
The register gives this chestnut an actual planting year, 1901, which is rarer than it sounds: most trees on this list carry a ten year band and nothing better.
Nuremberg
This park was a quarantine station.
Oss
This horse chestnut stands on the public square where Klaphekkenstraat meets Goudmijnstraat in Oss itself, banded by the national register to a planting around 1930, roughly a century old.
Ottawa
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.
Portland
Twenty nine metres is tall for a horse chestnut.
Roosendaal
This horse chestnut shares De Kring square with the Oriental plane the register also lists nearby, banded to a planting around 1840, roughly 190 years old and a decade older than its neighbour.
This horse chestnut stands behind the pond in Emile van Loonpark, banded by the national register to a planting around 1870, roughly 160 years old.
Zaanstad
One of the most planted trees in Europe is a threatened species in the wild.
A fungus at the foot of a tree is the last thing to appear, not the first.
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