The Huissensedijk Plane

The thickest Oriental plane in the Netherlands stands beside the smallest, whitest church in Arnhem, and the two have shared roughly two centuries of the same ground. Sources disagree on exactly how long: the tree is usually dated to somewhere between 1725 and 1800, its circumference now around 7.1 to 7.5 metres, short stemmed with arms so thick they read as separate trunks holding up one broad crown above the dike. In the winter floods of 1926, with the surrounding polder underwater, a farmer strung a rope from his raised farmhouse to this tree and used it to pull a small boat across the flooded land so his children could still reach school and the household could still shop. During the Second World War, German troops occupying the little Bonifatiuskerk beside it made the tree a direct witness to the occupation, and when the Battle of Arnhem tore through the city in September 1944, the village of Elden and this tree both came through largely unscathed while much of Arnhem did not. Its wounds since have been more mundane: storm damage patched in 1980, its heavy crown cabled in the 1990s to keep the arms from splitting under their own weight. It still stands exactly where the dike meets the church, in a corner of the city built around a football stadium and a ring road that mostly gets driven past rather than walked to.