The Weteringplantsoen Plane

This is the oldest tree in this group and the register has nothing to say about it. Planting: somewhere between 1880 and 1890. Reason for protection: monumental. History: unknown. That is the entire file on a London plane that has stood on the Eerste Weteringplantsoen for around 140 years. The date is worth holding on to, because of what the ground nearby had just stopped being. The Weteringschans beside it was laid out over Amsterdam's city ramparts after they were levelled between 1820 and 1840. A plane planted here in the 1880s went in while that change was still recent and this whole edge of town was new. London plane is the standard European city tree, and the reasons go beyond fashion. It sheds its bark in plates and takes the grime with it, which is how it stayed alive and legible through a century of coal smoke that turned other species black. It puts up with compacted roots, hard pruning and drought, and it is why the same tree lines streets from Barcelona to Berlin. Amsterdam has hundreds of them. This one has been at it longer than nearly all of them. Free, at the quieter end of the plantsoen. The leaning poplar, the wych elm and the ginkgo are each within two minutes on foot, which makes this corner an unusually dense patch of old trees for the middle of a city.