The Chestnut of Wiktorska

Warsaw wrote two trees in this one courtyard into its register of natural monuments on the same day in June 2020, 19 metres apart: this horse chestnut and a European ash. The chestnut is the smaller of the pair, 18 metres up on a trunk 251 centimetres round, which is a diameter of almost exactly 80 centimetres. The two figures the register gives agree with each other to within a centimetre, so somebody really did put a tape around it. The courtyard belongs to Osiedle WSM Mokotow, built by the interwar Warsaw Housing Cooperative, which laid its blocks out around shared open green instead of private gardens. That is why a tree this size is standing in the middle of a residential estate, and why you can generally walk in and look at it, although no source states the access outright and the yard is somebody's home ground. Nobody has recorded a planting date. The trunk points at roughly 80 to 110 years, derived from its thickness and from nothing else, so treat it as a range rather than a birthday. Anyone living in these blocks probably knows more than the register does, and we would like to hear it. Go in May, when the flower candles stand up off the crown. By late summer Warsaw's chestnuts brown under the leaf miner moth that reached Poland in the 1990s.