The Oriental Plane of Velperplein

Arnhem already has one Oriental plane with a claim to national fame, a giant beside a village church in Elden with a trunk over seven metres round. This is a second, smaller one, growing in the Velperplein park in the city centre, and its interest is where it grows rather than its size. Oriental plane is not the hybrid London plane that lines half of Europe's boulevards; it is the older, straight species, native from the Balkans to Iran, and this one has spent well over a century on a small, endlessly rebuilt city island rather than open ground. The monumental tree register puts its planting around 1900 to 1910 and links it, cautiously, to Leonard Springer's prize-winning 1880 design for the park, built over a filled-in canal after the city ran a public competition for the site; the register's own dating and that 1880 connection do not quite line up, so the link is a guess rather than a documented fact, and it is told here as one. What is not in doubt is that the tree has outlasted the square around it twice, once when the park went in and again when the whole plein was rebuilt for new roads, cycle paths and a bus station between 1995 and 2005. It stands in the open, free to walk up to any day of the year.