The London plane may not be from London at all. It is a hybrid of the oriental plane and the American sycamore, and the cross seems to have happened by accident in the seventeenth century, somewhere the two parents grew side by side. One theory puts it in a London garden; another in Spain, which is why botanists also call it Platanus hispanica. This one stands a few steps north of the Spanish Embassy, which is either a coincidence or the tree being diplomatic. Its spot is a crossing: Lichtensteinallee meets the Grosser Weg here, two of the paths that thread the south-western Tiergarten towards the zoo and the Landwehr Canal. Hybrid vigour is part of why the London plane is everywhere in European cities. It grows fast, takes heavy pruning and poor soil, and puts up with air that kills more delicate trees. A plane in a park, with no kerb pressing on its roots, gets to show what it does when nobody is in its way. Berlin protects it as Naturdenkmal 1-87/B. A second protected plane stands about 200 metres to the north-west, east of the Neuer See, so the two make an easy pair on one walk. The register stops at the species and the spot. No age, no girth, no height. If you know any of them, or measure the trunk yourself, we would like to hear.
bristly seed balls hang on through winter, long after the leaves have goneAutumn colour
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.
Grosser Tiergarten, Lichtensteinallee at Grosser Weg, north of the Spanish Embassy You can recognise it by the plane's patchwork bark and maple-shaped leaves. It stands where Lichtensteinallee crosses the Grosser Weg, just north of the Spanish Embassy.
Free; Grosser Tiergarten is a public park open at all hours.
S/U Zoologischer Garten about 12 min walk
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.