The Great Plane of Sydney Gardens

This plane is thought to be older than the park it stands in. The Sydney Gardens tree trail dates its planting to 1777, eighteen years before Sydney Gardens was laid out in 1795, which would mean the garden's makers drew their paths around a tree that was already there. The trail says "thought to", and so do we. Nobody has counted its rings, and the date is the gardens' own best estimate, not a record. The size is not an estimate. The tree stands 28 metres tall with a trunk 6.6 metres round, the largest of the gardens' planes, measured for the 2021 trail from an arboricultural survey made the year before for the restoration of the park. If the 1777 date holds, this trunk has watched the whole history of the place happen a few metres from its roots. The ornate bridge just down the path carries the date 1800, when the Kennet and Avon Canal came through. From 1839 the Great Western Railway was cut through the gardens too, so a Georgian pleasure ground ended up with a canal and a main line running across it, and this plane outlasted the arrival of both. Not every big plane makes it. A felled trunk on the lower lawn belonged to another of the gardens' planes, cut down in 2018 because of fungus. This one is still growing, labelled as stop 8 on the trail, on the way down to the canal.