The Oriental Plane of Wertheimpark

In a bad summer this plane stays green while its cousins go brown. Plane anthracnose, the leaf blight that leaves common planes blotchy and half bare by August, troubles the Oriental plane much less, which is one way to pick this tree out of the group standing along Wertheimpark's water. Its age is a real disagreement rather than a rounding error. Amsterdam's register of special trees gives a planting year of 1900. The Dutch Tree Foundation's guide to the city's monumental trees dates what reads as the same tree to 1880 or 1890. Nobody has reconciled the two, so the honest answer is somewhere between 126 and 146 years old, and this page is not going to pick a winner for the sake of a tidy number. The trunk measures 4.42 metres around. Platanus orientalis is the older half of the London plane's parentage, a species from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia that European gardens have been planting since the sixteenth century, and its leaves are cut deeper, into narrower fingers, than the hybrid lining most Amsterdam streets. In a park this small you can stand under both within two minutes and see it. It sits in a tight group of five or six registered trees along the water, including two Caucasian wingnuts of roughly its own age, which makes this corner of the park the densest thing of its kind in central Amsterdam.