The Plane Tree of St Anne's

The biggest tree on this walk is not in a park. It grows on the grounds of St Anne's University Hospital between pavilions V and C1, and the easiest way in is the gate on the south side off Hybešova. Nobody asks your business at a public teaching hospital, but this is a working campus rather than a public garden, so take it quietly. The plane repays the detour. Its trunk measures 565 to 575 centimetres round, the two figures a few years apart rather than two different trees, and it divides into several secondary stems about four metres up. Before the crown was cut back it spread close to 40 metres, measured in 2004. The hospital behind it went up between 1865 and 1868, a Neo-Renaissance design by the Viennese architect Theophil Hansen. Local sources suspect the tree was planted with the building, which would put it over 150 years old, but nobody has demonstrated that and the register carries no age at all, so treat the link as likely rather than settled. What is certain is that this crown has been the view from a great many hospital windows, in a city that has been sending its sick to this address for more than a century and a half.