Photo: Hopefully Acceptable Username (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Charles II wanted Versailles and settled for Greenwich instead.
Sweet Chestnut
In January 1949 a runaway bus above Trento was stopped by a chestnut tree, and local accounts still argue about which one. This page maps every sweet chestnut on the site, 10 so far across 8 cities.
Sweet chestnut collects that kind of story because it stays around long enough: the one in Ashton Park in Bristol is about 600 years old, and the three at Arnhem, known locally as Hans, Gretel and the Witch, have been standing roughly 370. 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 trees the whole trunk looks wrung out like a towel. Charles II is behind the Greenwich Park tree, one of the chestnuts planted for the formal avenues he ordered cut through the park after taking the throne in 1660. Six are mapped, including the oldest tree in Edinburgh's Botanics, which was growing there before the garden arrived.
London
Nijmegen
Photo: MPhernambucq (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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.
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.
Edinburgh
Photo: M J Richardson, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The oldest tree in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden was already growing here before the garden was.
Bristol
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...
Maastricht
Nobody can say exactly when this tree was planted, and the people who study it are refreshingly honest about that.
Arnhem
Photo: Henk Monster (CC BY 3.0)
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.
Venlo
The farm is nearly four centuries old and the tree is only two, which is the correct order for once.
The national register of monumental trees contains, for this tree, the testimony of an old man who walked past.
Trento
Somewhere in this chestnut grove above Trento stands a tree that stopped a runaway bus in January 1949.
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