Amsterdam city council, currently in the grip of remodel-close it-or tear it down fever, was denied permission to cut down the 150-year-old chestnut tree that featured prominently in the diary of Anne Frank.

In court, a judge ruled the city had given insufficient consideration to alternate ways of safeguarding the tree's environment, such as using steel cables to anchor it to parts of the museum. He gave the different parties until mid-January to come up with a new solution.

The significance of the tree in the diary is that the tree stood for the outside world, the normal world before the war," Rolf Wolfswinkel, a professor of history at New York University and the academic adviser to the Anne Frank Center of New York, told ABC News.

By the tree's changing leaves, Anne Frank could tell the turning seasons.

Providing further evidence that the Anne Frank Foundation is missing some of it's marbles, Hans Westra, the director of the Anne Frank Foundation told journalists "What can you do with a piece of dead wood," This is no longer the tree that Anne saw." By that logic the Anne Frank Museums newly constructed headquarters which blights the neigbourhood next to the (Anne Frank) house on the Prinsengracht renders the house no longer as Anne saw it, perhaps it should be torn down as well.