The Plane of the Munnikenbolwerk

This plane arrived half a century late for its own park. The Munnikenbolwerk is one of the bastions Alkmaar threw up in 1565 and stopped needing long before Zocher turned the whole belt into a landscape park in 1870. The register is blunt about where this tree sits in that sequence: its planting is dated some fifty years after the design was finished, and the city's 2017 list of monumental trees bands it between 1920 and 1930. So it is not one of the founding trees. It was put in by people who inherited somebody else's park and decided it needed another plane. They chose well, which you can tell from the fact that it is still here a century later and that the building behind it has changed use more than once. It now stands behind the art lending library on Achter de Vest, about fifty metres from the old elm on the same bastion, which makes the pair a two minute walk. One warning, because it catches people out. Alkmaar has a second monumental London plane on the same rampart belt, roughly 200 metres away over the water near Zevenhuizen 23, and that one is a generation older. Two planes, one rampart. This is the inland one, behind the building. The city's list calls the species Platanus x hispanica and the register calls it Platanus x acerifolia. Same hybrid, different naming habit.