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A huge horse chestnut tree fondly described by Anne Frank in her diary about life in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam is set to be cut down because it is diseased, officials said Tuesday.
"We are sad but we think the tests were clear and it's not safe to leave the tree," Patricia Bosboom of the Anne Frank Foundation told AFP.
The horse chestnut, estimated to be more than 150 years old, has been in a bad condition for years. It sits in the garden of a canal house on Amsterdam's Keizersgracht that is overlooked by the annex the Frank family hid in, which has been turned into a museum.
"We both looked up to the blue sky, the horse chestnut whose bare branches glittered with droplets, the gulls and the other birds that seemed made of silver as they swooped by. All of this moved us so much that we could not speak," Anne Frank wrote in her diary on February 23, 1944.
Her father Otto Frank said in a 1968 speech that he never knew how important the tree was to his daughter until he read the diary.
"She was never interested in nature but she longed for it when she felt like a caged bird. Only the thought of the open air gave her comfort," he said.
Recent tests showed that over 42 percent of tree is rotten and that it is too diseased to recover. Now the residents of the canal house have asked for a licence to fell the tree.
The procedure to grant a licence will take another couple of weeks and the horse chestnut is not expected to be cut down before next year.
Bosboom said the Anne Frank Foundation will not protest the felling of the tree.
"They did what they could, it will be strange when it is no longer there but the tree could not be saved," she said.
The authorities are planning to put a graft of the old horse chestnut, which will be 100 percent genetically similar, in exactly the same spot.
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AFP 141209 GMT 11 06
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