The Westkant Plane of Wertheimpark

Five metres of trunk in a hundred and twenty-five years is quick work. Amsterdam's register of special trees puts this plane's planting at 1900 and its girth at 500 centimetres; the Dutch Tree Foundation, surveying the same park for its own walking guide to the city's monumental trees, describes a plane here with a trunk of almost five metres. Two institutions, one measurement, no argument. London planes grow fast when young, and this one had good ground for it. Wertheimpark was laid out in 1812 as Amsterdam's first public park, on the edge of the Plantage, a quarter the city had set aside for gardens rather than housing over a century earlier. The park has stayed small, barely three quarters of a hectare, which packs around fifteen trees over a century old into a two minute walk. This is the west side specimen, on the Plantage Parklaan flank, a short distance from Jan Wolkers' Auschwitz memorial of 1977: broken mirrors set into the ground so the sky comes back cracked. The plane was already forty years old when the deportations that monument answers to began. The city files it as beschermwaardige houtopstand, its settled protected class rather than the provisional tier. That guarantees nothing about a tree's health, but it does mean somebody with a clipboard comes back.