The trunk of this plane is covered in burrs, and it is older than Belfast's famous plane. The Friends of Belfast Botanic Gardens, the only source we have for it, say so plainly. The famous one is the tree at the City Hospital grown from seed of the Plane Tree of Kos in the late 1960s, the one Northern Ireland voted Tree of the Year in 2017. This one, a short walk away in the Botanic Gardens, came first and gets a fraction of the attention. The burrs are the reason to come. Numerous knobbly swellings crowd the trunk, and the Friends compare the tree to a similarly burred oriental plane at Trinity College Dublin, which is about as much pedigree as anyone has written down. Above them the branches spread wide. No age, girth or height has been published, and we would rather say that than guess. The gardens were founded in 1828, but nothing ties this tree to that year, so we will not date it from it. If you know when it went in, or have a tape measure and five minutes, tell us. It is a single-source tree, which is why it carries a flag. The pin is the Friends' own published position for the tagged trunk, so it should be close. The gardens are a free council park, a few minutes from Botanic station.
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Getting there
Belfast Botanic Gardens, College Park, Belfast BT7 1LP
You can recognise it by the trunk crowded with knobbly burrs and the wide-spreading branches above them. It stands in Belfast Botanic Gardens and carries black maintenance tag no. 88.
Free. Belfast Botanic Gardens is a public council park (opening hours not checked).
Botanic railway station is beside the gardens; buses on Botanic Avenue.
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
