The London Plane of the Ciutadella

The city register lists 273 plane trees under a single entry for the Rambles. This is one of the few it catalogued on its own. The London plane is the default tree of Barcelona's streets, planted by the hundred and cut back to knuckles every winter, which is exactly what makes an unpruned one worth walking to. This tree stands between the Ciutadella lake and the zoo fence, carrying a 3.6 metre trunk under a crown 24 metres across and 25 metres tall, very nearly as wide as it is high. That shape is simply what a plane does when nobody interferes. Its age is honestly unknown: the register took all the measurements and left the planting year blank, no other source dates it, and it went onto the list in 2021 on size alone. The park around it opened in 1888 for the Universal Exposition and most of the big trees in it date from that work or the decades just after, which puts this one somewhere above a century without proving anything. The species is an accident to begin with, a hybrid of the American and oriental planes that turned up in a seventeenth century garden and proved able to shrug off soot, drought and compacted roots better than either parent.