De Koekampkastanje

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 of Records. It got there by being loved. Many of the trees on this side of the city vanished during the German occupation, burned in stoves for want of coal or felled to clear the line of a tank ditch, and this chestnut came through both. Fifty years later a road nearly did what the war had not. The plan for the Koningstunnel, drawn up in 1995, ran through the chestnut and through a monumental linden standing beside it. The city expected paperwork and got an argument: people were attached to these two trees in a way nobody had budgeted for. The tunnel route was shifted sideways to spare the linden. For the chestnut, engineers asked a stranger question, whether a tree that size could simply be moved, and the answer turned out to be yes. Steel plates went under the root ball and the whole thing was hauled slowly towards the Malieveld. It recovered. The crown is full again and a small sign at the foot of the trunk records what happened, ten minutes from Den Haag Centraal.