The Horse Chestnut of the Park Eekhout

A horse chestnut that has reached a hundred and seventy years is doing better than most of its kind manage now. The species has had a bad half century in Europe. Bleeding canker, a bacterial infection that leaves rusty weeping patches on the bark, has killed a large share of mature trees since the 1990s. The horse chestnut leaf miner, a moth whose larvae tunnel between the leaf surfaces, arrived in the Netherlands around 2002 and now browns the foliage of nearly every tree in the country from July onward. The moth does not kill, but a tree that loses its leaves two months early every year for twenty years is a weakened tree. So an old, big, still standing chestnut is worth registering as the survivor it is. It stands in the southeast part of the Park Eekhout, on the ring of the old fortifications, banded 1850 to 1860. Come in the first half of May, before the miner gets going. That is when the tree does the thing it was planted for: hundreds of upright white flower spikes over the whole crown, each one with a yellow throat that turns red once the flower has been pollinated and no longer wants visitors.