Photographed 21st March 2021. Info below The tree was one of 20 grown by a Reading horticulturalist from seeds from the only surviving tree on the French battlefield. It was planted on January 18, 1976, by 87-year-old Gordon Fisher, a local ‘Old Contemptible’, the term used by those in the British Expeditionary Force which served in Flanders within range of the enemy mobile artillery between August 5 and November 22, 1914. The horse chestnut was grown from a conker collected from a tree in Verdun - the only one to survive the tragic battle which took place there in 1916 and obliterated the rest of the landscape. Verdun tree - Wikipedia
