Anne Frank Tree to Stay

NIS News ^ | January 23 2008

[knighthawk]

AMSTERDAM, 24/01/08 - The Anne Frank Tree in Amsterdam will be left in place for at least five to ten years. A special construction will support the world-famous chestnut, Arnold Heertje, a committee member of the Support Anne Frank Tree foundation, reported yesterday.

The Jewish girl Anne Frank looked out on the chestnut from her hiding place in WWII and wrote about it in her world-famous diary. The announcement at the end of 2007 that the tree would be felled prompted worldwide attention in the media. On the internet, chestnuts from the tree were offered for sale for hundreds of euros each.

The Centrum district of Amsterdam municipality and the Anne Frank Foundation wanted to cut down the tree because it has been attacked by an aggressive fungus. A court declared at the end of 2007 that those for and against the felling must first try to reach a compromise before a definite decision was made. This agreement has now been reached.

Support Anne Frank Tree will take over the care of the tree from Amsterdam's Centrum district council from February. The organisation will start a fund-raising campaign. The support construction will cost 50,000 euros, and Support Anne Frank Tree also needs a one-off sum of 20,000 euros for work on the chestnut's top and about 10,000 euros a year for maintenance of the tree.

[knighthawk]

Ping

[SoCalPol]

I visited the Ann Frank house some years back.
A very moving experience

[Cicero]

Good. Sometimes an old tree deserves to stay, even if there’s not much left of it.

I recently saw a photograph of Sir Philip Sidney’s oak at Penshurst, estimated to be a thousand years old. Ben Jonson mentions it in his poem, “To Penshurst.”

The trunk was rotten and hollowed out, and recently some foolish children set it on fire, burning most of the remains. But there’s still a hollow burned-out trunk standing, and one small living branch sticking out from one side of it.

I’d post a picture here, but I couldn’t find one on the net.

[Cicero]

I did find a video of the tree at National Geographic. It doesn’t look to bad to me.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071120-frank-video-ap.html

[elcid1970]

Bet the Muslims want it taken down.

Chestnut trees are vulnerable to blight. That’s why they’re gone from North America.

I put nothing past those people.

[blackdog]

I lived thru the William Penn Oak being cut down in my town. It was tragic. It had many years left to live, but it was in the way of "progress" on that street. There wasn't a sidewalk poured that the root mass couldn't heave. It was a true monster.

I wonder if the owners of the Frank tree sell seedlings from it? My grandmother kept a Dutch Elm alive for three decades during the Dutch Elm disease time. She cut a few whips every year for family members to propagate.

[blam]

[Wilhelm Tell]

There is something majestic about an ancient tree, even if it is in a poor condition. Some people have no imagination and they have no reverence for anything. They think that anything older than yesterday is irrelevant and should be destroyed. They claim to be ultra-modern, but to me such people are savages.

[Cicero]

Agreed. We have some old sugar maples along the roads here, and they are losing limbs and starting to die, but they are beautiful as long as they last.

My daughter and her family visited Oaxaca last year, before the radical strike there. There's a giant Tule tree that may be one of the biggest in the world.

Here's a picture of the trunk, which is said to be 154 feet in circumference: