The Plane Tree of Benešova

This plane outlasted a bus station. The corner of Benešova and Divadelní held Brno's central bus terminal, a modernist building of 1948 and 1949 by Bohuslav Fuchs, a name attached to much of the city's functionalist architecture. The buses left. The tree stayed, and it is now the protected thing on a corner where everything else has changed its use at least once. It is the plainest entry on this walk, not a park specimen but a street tree at a junction five minutes from the main station, which is exactly what makes it easy to find. Its trunk measures 368 centimetres in the national register; the Czech Wikipedia list of the district's memorial trees gives 310 at the same coordinates, an older measurement rather than a different tree. Nobody has published an age for it, anywhere, and that gap stays a gap here rather than becoming a plausible number. Brno's own street records list the tree as Benešova 0/01, a plot rather than a building, which is what Czech addressing does with something that has been given standing of its own. Walk past it on the way in from the train and you have started this walk before you meant to.