The Chestnut of Pulawska and Merliniego

This chestnut has outlasted the government that protected it. Poland listed it as a natural monument on 28 December 1988, ten months before the Round Table talks that ended communist rule, and it has stood through everything since on an ordinary pavement corner where ulica Pulawska meets ulica Merliniego in Mokotow. Aesculus hippocastanum is not native to Poland. It came from the mountains of the Balkans by way of Vienna's gardens in the sixteenth century and spread across Central Europe as a street and park tree, valued for shade rather than for age, which makes a chestnut still standing at a road junction after decades of protection worth noticing. In May its whole crown lights up with upright white flower spikes, candles rising above the leaves, visible from the traffic waiting at the corner. The register that protects it gives no age and no girth, only the date it was designated and the coordinates of the corner. Two more searches this year turned up nothing beyond the same official listing. If you know how old this tree really is, or have ever measured its trunk, tell us; right now the record only says it has stood, protected, since before Poland's own transition away from communist rule.