The Plane by the Wingnuts
How do I find it? You can recognise it by bark flaking in irregular plates that leave the trunk patched olive, cream and grey, standing about ten metres east of the second wingnut near the north end of the pond. It is the thickest trunk in the park.
At 5.66 metres round, this is the thickest trunk anyone has measured in the park, wider than the famous cedars and wider than the big oak thirty metres away. It has no name, no plaque and no entry in any register. It turned up in a dendrologist's survey of the park in 2021 and that is the whole of its paper trail. It stands about ten metres east of the second of the park's wingnuts, near the north end of the pond. Planes are easy to pick out once the eye knows them: bark that flakes off in irregular plates and leaves the trunk patched in olive, cream and grey, a pattern that keeps changing as the tree sheds, and seed balls that hang on bare branches through the winter like small brown lanterns. We have not established which plane it is. The London plane is the usual one in a park of this date, but nobody has said so in print about this tree, so we have not written it down as fact. If you can tell an oriental plane from a London plane by the leaf lobes or the seed balls, stand under it and tell us.
- Species
- Plane (Platanus sp.)
- Age estimate
- Girth
- 5.66 m
- Location
- About ten metres east of the second wingnut, Schlosspark, Bad Homburg vor der Hohe, 61348 Hessen, Germany (Schlosspark, north end of the pond)
- Access
- Free. The Schlosspark is a Hessian state park, open to walk through with no gate and no ticket; the palace buildings themselves are ticketed.
- Getting there
- Bad Homburg station is roughly 25 minutes from Frankfurt on the S5, and the Schlosspark is about a ten-minute walk from there.
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
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