The Plane of Lauwersgrachtpark

Three separately registered monumental trees stand within 150 metres of each other behind Arnhem's concert hall, and this plane is the one nobody mentions. The country's oldest Canadian poplar is about 140 metres off and takes all the attention, a sessile oak of the same era stands nearby, and the plane is simply the largest thing in the southern half of Lauwersgrachtpark. The national register dates its planting to between 1880 and 1890 and suggests, without committing to it, that the tree probably went in when the plantsoen here was redesigned around 1890 to Leonard Springer's plan, the scheme that gave Arnhem's ring of canal-side parks their present shape. That puts it at roughly 140 years. It helps to know what you are standing under. The London plane is a hybrid of the oriental plane and an American species, thrown up in a garden somewhere in the seventeenth century, and it turned out to shrug off coal smoke, compacted soil and brutal pruning, which is why it now lines half the streets in Europe. Arnhem is one of the few cities where you can set the hybrid beside one of its parents in an afternoon: oriental planes stand on Velperplein and out on the Huissensedijk, with more deeply cut leaves and darker bark than the flaking, paler patchwork on this trunk. Free, public park, about fifteen minutes from the station.