The Plane of Kysucká Street

Six metres and eleven centimetres round the trunk, standing in a wood where nobody planted it for show. The plane on the road up to Zelezna studnicka is Bratislava's protected tree number 231, and a measurer put a tape around it in 2012: 6.11 metres at chest height, 27.2 metres tall, and a planting he read as around 1880. That makes it roughly 160 years old now. Which plane it is has never been settled, and the two sources that describe it disagree. The state register calls it platan zapadny, western plane, which in Slovak usually means the American sycamore. Monumentaltrees, whose measurer took the figures above, records it as the London plane, the hybrid that Europe planted along half its avenues. They are close relatives and easy to confuse without looking at the bark, which flakes into pale patches on the hybrid and stays more uniform on the pure American tree. If you get there and look up, you can settle it, and we would like to know. The setting is the reason to go. Zelezna studnicka is the valley Bratislava walks in at weekends, a chain of ponds and paths along the Vydrica stream under the Small Carpathians, and this tree stands in the open beside the path rather than in anybody's garden. Most of the city's protected trees do not: they sit in front gardens and behind courtyard walls, which is why this page is shorter than the register would suggest.