The Oriental Plane of Placa de la Universitat

Every plane tree on the streets around this one is a hybrid. This is one of the parents. The city register carries eleven separate entries for London planes and exactly one for Platanus orientalis, the eastern species that crossed with the American plane in some seventeenth century garden to produce the tree that now lines most of the Eixample. The difference shows in the leaf, cut far more deeply into narrow lobes, and in the habit, which is lower and looser than the hybrid's. The register dates this one to 1933 and puts it at 18 metres with a two metre trunk under a crown almost as wide as the tree is tall. It was planted during the Second Republic, three years before the war, on the square in front of the university's main building, and it has spent its entire life on one of the busiest crossings in the city: trams first, then traffic, then the demonstrations that a university square inevitably collects. The species is the plane of Greek and Persian writing, the tree Herodotus has Xerxes stopping to decorate with gold on the march west. This one gets exhaust fumes and shade duty, and handles them about as well.