The Chestnut of the Vrijbroekweg

The national register of monumental trees contains, for this tree, the testimony of an old man who walked past. It is written down as exactly that: according to an elderly passer-by, the tree is older than 1870, and in that year it was damaged on one side by a fire, from which it recovered quickly enough. No document, no source, no name. Somebody stopped, told the surveyor a story, and the surveyor thought it worth recording rather than discarding. That is the right call and it is worth defending, because oral memory is often the only evidence a tree has. A fire that scorched one flank in 1870 is the kind of thing a family repeats for a century and no archive ever notices. It also happens to be checkable in principle: fire damage on a chestnut leaves a permanent scar down one side where the cambium died, with the bark rolling in over the edges of the wound for decades afterwards. So look at the trunk all the way round. If one side carries an old healed scar, an anonymous man was right and the register is better than its sources. October for the nuts.