The Plane of the Snouckaertlaan

A plane of this age on a Dutch street corner is a tree that has survived every plan anyone has had for the ground. The register bands it 1830 to 1840, which puts it here before the villa quarter around it, before the Utrechtseweg was the road it is now, and before almost any of the buildings it stands among. It has spent nearly two centuries on the corner of the Snouckaertlaan while the city rearranged itself. Planes get this job because they take punishment better than anything else their size. Compacted soil, roots cut for cables, salt, exhaust, and hard pruning: a plane shrugs at all of it and regrows. The species is a hybrid, probably of the oriental plane and the American sycamore, and it first appeared in European gardens in the seventeenth century as an accident of two exotic trees being planted near each other. The bark is the giveaway and the reason it works in a city. It sheds in irregular plates, taking whatever has settled on it with it, so the trunk is a camouflage of cream, olive and grey that never blackens. The seed balls hang on all winter, on stalks, like small hard fruit.