The Nightingale Valley Plane

Somebody bricked this tree up. The London plane beside the weir in Nightingale Valley is hollow, and people had taken to lighting fires inside it, so the open trunk was filled in with brickwork to stop them. It worked. The plane is still alive, and the brick patch has become the easiest way to tell it from everything else along Brislington Brook. It is a big tree to have survived that. The Bristol Tree Forum measured the trunk at 6.75 metres round, says the crown fills the little valley of the brook, and estimates it at about 250 years old. That age is the Forum's own estimate from the size, not a planting date. The Forum also thinks the tree was probably associated with nearby Brislington House, though it gives no record of who planted it or when. A walker who wrote up the brook path in 2018 passed on the local view that this is the oldest plane in Bristol. Nobody has published the measurements to settle it, so take that as what people round here say rather than a fact we can stand behind. It would not be a surprising title. The other big planes the city is known for, in Queen Square and Mina Road Park, were planted around the 1880s. The brook path can be muddy after rain. The whole trunk can be seen from the path by the weir, with no need to leave it.