The Oberlaa Horse Chestnut

This horse chestnut has grown twelve centimetres round the trunk since Vienna made it a monument, which is the best news we have about it. The city protected it on 8 November 2007 as Natural Monument 808, "because of its free-standing crown and its effect on the townscape". The trunk was then 2.75 metres round, the tree about 18 metres tall and the crown about 10 metres across. The city's tree inventory now records 2.87 metres. A trunk that keeps thickening is a tree that is alive, and that matters for this species in Vienna, where horse chestnuts suffer from the leaf-miner moth, which browns their leaves by late summer, and from bleeding canker on the bark. We have not checked this one's health, and the newest photograph we know of dates from 2014. It is not a giant. What it has is room: one crown standing clear on a street in Oberlaa, with nothing crowding it, which is exactly what the city chose to protect. Come in May, when it carries its white flower candles. Nobody has dated it; if you know when it was planted, tell us. About eighty metres away, on the Bischofplatz, stands a protected Caucasian wingnut, so the two make one short stop. If you go, tell us how the leaves look.