Charles II wanted Versailles and settled for Greenwich instead.
Photo: Hopefully Acceptable Username (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Sweet Chestnut
Castanea sativa
On the slope of Etna above Sant'Alfio, what looks like three enormous chestnuts is one tree: the Hundred-Horse Chestnut, named for a queen said to have sheltered under it with a hundred mounted knights, and put at about 2,200 years by Italy's agricultural research council in 2022. We map 31 of them, in 26 cities.
Sweet chestnut collects stories because it stays around long enough. Corsica's Bread Tree at Pianello is so called because for centuries its nuts were the bread. In January 1949 a runaway bus above Trento was stopped by a chestnut, and local accounts still argue about which one. The trunk gives the age away better than any plaque, because as a chestnut ages its bark starts to spiral around the stem, and on the oldest the whole trunk looks wrung out like a towel. Charles II is behind the Greenwich Park tree, planted for the formal avenues he ordered after 1660.
London
Eindhoven
In fruit
Two registers place this chestnut within eighty centimetres of each other and disagree about its age by fifty years.
Edinburgh
Autumn colour
The oldest tree in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden was already growing here before the garden was.
Photo: M J Richardson, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Vancouver
In fruit
There are two Spanish chestnuts on West 20th Avenue, and the heritage-listed one is the smaller.
Girona
In fruit
Nine metres and seventy centimetres round, standing behind a hermitage on a plateau in the Rocacorba hills.
Maastricht
In fruit
Nobody can say exactly when this tree was planted, and the people who study it are refreshingly honest about that.
Dresden
In fruit
Nobody agrees why there are five.
Photo: Derbrauni (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Nijmegen
In fruit
Children in Beek have been told for generations that gnomes live inside this tree, which is how a sweet chestnut came to be called the Gnome Tree.
Photo: MPhernambucq (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In fruit
Four Catholic parishes petitioned Nijmegen's city council in 1884 for permission to open a shared cemetery on the Daalseweg, and the bishop of 's-Hertogenbosch consecrated it the following June.
Bristol
In fruit
Sweet Chestnuts spiral as they age, their bark twisting around the trunk in a pattern that gets more pronounced with every passing century, and Ashton Park's oldest is a dramatic example: an estima...
Amersfoort
In fruit
This sweet chestnut grows on what the register itself calls former barracks ground, on the Leusderweg side of what is now Juliana van Stolberg park.
Venlo
In fruit
The farm is nearly four centuries old and the tree is only two, which is the correct order for once.
In fruit
The national register of monumental trees contains, for this tree, the testimony of an old man who walked past.
Arnhem
Locals call them Hans, Gretel and the Witch, and Arnhem's storytellers like to credit Karel van Egmond, the last independent Duke of Guelders, with planting these three sweet chestnuts by hand.
Photo: Henk Monster (CC BY 3.0)
In fruit
This is the one tree on Arnhem's list you have to go looking for.
Ronda
Christian troops heard mass at the foot of this chestnut before going to fight, and that is where the name comes from: the holy chestnut.
Autumn colour
Nobody walking the Camino del Molino Real gets past this one without stopping.
Cardiff
In fruit
Bute Park holds more than 3,000 catalogued trees and 50 British champions, and it took until 2023 for anyone to formally record this sweet chestnut as a veteran.
Časta
In fruit
Slovakia's largest sweet chestnut does not grow in a park or an arboretum.
Graz
In fruit
A storm once snapped the top off this chestnut, and it carried on regardless.
Photo: Christian Pirkl (CC BY-SA 3.0 at)
Liverpool
In fruit
The age of this sweet chestnut comes from a division sum.
Nantes
In fruit
Local tradition puts this chestnut in the ground in the year 756.
Photo: François de Dijon (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Pianello
In fruit
In Corsica this chestnut is called the Bread Tree, because for centuries its nuts were the bread.
Sant'Alfio
In fruit
What looks like three enormous chestnuts on the slope above Sant'Alfio is one tree.
In fruit
One source dates this chestnut to roughly 1,800 years old; a second confirms only that it is over a thousand, without putting a number on it.
Photo: AusTitz (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Senonches
In fruit
The people who planted this tree lived in a forester's house at the Rond de Condé.
Trento
In fruit
Somewhere in this chestnut grove above Trento stands a tree that stopped a runaway bus in January 1949.
Vales
Portugal's thickest chestnut stands on private farmland, and its owner wants you to come in.
Viroflay
In fruit
This chestnut's shape was cut into it by winegrowers.
Wrexham
In the hard years after the Second World War, Acton Park was stripped for firewood.
Ypres
This chestnut was cut to a stump by shelling in the First World War, and what grew back from the surviving roots was not one trunk but four.
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