It’s not often that a person gets to grow up in a shadow of an ancient being. A living, breathing creature that seems as if looking at it could spread wisdom. A decade is nothing to him, for he has seen more than any of us could ever imagine. It’s not often you find someone like him.
Or, a tree like him, I should say.
My European Horse Chestnut in full bloom
It’s hard to know exactly how old this tree is. I originally thought it was over three hundred years old, but some recalculations proved that deathly wrong. The official equation to find the age of a tree without cutting it down and counting its rings is:
diameter * growth factor = age
Finding the diameter was quite fun. At chest height (about 1.2 meters or 4 feet), find the circumference of the trunk. I used a long piece of gardening rope, and later measured it to find that it was 366 centimeters, or 144 inches (3.5 meters or 12 feet). I still had to find the growth factor.
The original mistake I had was searching for the American Chestnut instead of the European Horse Chestnut, which is a quite a different species.
Castanea Sativa (American Chestnut)
My scouring of the internet told me the growth factor was 8, and I was ignorant enough to believe everything the internet said. Following the formula (finding the diameter with circumference divided by π),
144/π ≈ 45.84
45.84 * 8 = 366.72
I was amazed by this information. 367 years ago is 1654. Before “America” was even created. That would have been miraculous to say the least.
Wait a minute. Roll it back. How did I even know this was a European Horse Chestnut in the first place? For a long time I knew the scientific name, Aesculus Hippocastanum. My father had told me many times that this was a horse chestnut tree. So I took it into my hands to verify check this. Searching “horse chestnut” and “aesculus hippocastanum” I found an image matching perfectly with my tree.
European Horse Chestnut (Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé, Flora of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, 1885, Germany)
I knew this was my plant. So I did some extra research. I learned that the European Horse Chestnut was found all across Europe, but was specifically native to The Balkans, or the Balkan Peninsula, a stretch of Europe containing Bulgaria, Greece, and other countries. I learned that the horse chestnuts themselves are poisonous to humans, but perfectly safe for many animals, unlike the Chinese chestnuts are often roasted over fires and consumed. I also learned of the many diseases that they were facing, such as the dangerous wide-spread Bleeding Canker.
Then came my predicament. I had stumbled upon the growth factor for the tree, but I was never really sure if it really was 8. However, I did know from research that the aesculus hippocastanum species grows about thirteen to twenty-four inches every year. Searching for an equation, I found:
height / growth rate = growth factor
Using this, the equation became:
50 / 13 ≈ 4
Four. Half of my original hypothesis. Now the age of my tree was about 183, meaning it was planted in 1837. That’s… okay, too, I guess… It seems more likely, and it would mean that when our home was built in 1891, the tree would have been 50+ years old. The original owners of my house may have chosen to build the house right next to the tree!
During my research, I discovered that the Horse Chestnut’s conservation status is “Vulnerable”. This means that something is happening to it that is causing them to die in small (but still impactful) numbers. I found an important cause of this: The Horse-Chestnut leaf miner, a species of leaf mining moth. If this gets out of control, Horse Chestnuts could become critically endangered, or even extinct in the wild.
Due to this, I have started The Chestnut Nursery, dedicated to growing horse chestnut saplings. If you would like to adopt a tree in the New York/New Jersey area, fill out our adoption form. Tell as many others as you can about our effort! Thank you in advance for your support of this amazing species!!