The Horse Chestnut of the Dorpsstraat

One of the most planted trees in Europe is a threatened species in the wild. Aesculus hippocastanum survives naturally in a handful of mountain ravines in Greece, Albania and North Macedonia and nowhere else on earth, which is why the conservation lists rate it vulnerable while millions of them stand along streets from Dublin to Kyiv. It arrived in the west in the sixteenth century by way of Constantinople and Vienna, as a curiosity for rich gardens. This one grows beside Dorpsstraat 507 in Assendelft, and the house number rewards a second look: the Dorpsstraat runs the whole length of a village that is essentially one very long road laid across the polder. The register puts the tree's planting between 1900 and 1910, so about 120 years, in a strip of municipal garden it has had to itself ever since. The name is a puzzle you can work on while standing there. Look at the twigs in winter, at the scar where last year's leaf came away: a horseshoe outline with a row of small dots where the nails would sit. Whether that is where the horse in horse chestnut comes from, or whether it comes from the Ottoman habit of dosing broken-winded horses with the seeds, has never been settled. Nobody recorded who planted this one. The register's history field is blank and no second source mentions the tree at all.