The Secular Plane of Cișmigiu

In 2018 a municipal crew digging a trench for park lighting cut through two of the main support roots of Cișmigiu's oldest tree, and within two years a full quarter of its crown had dried out and died. The plane tree is reckoned at around 200 years old by one account and closer to 170 by another that ties its planting more directly to the park's own founding, when Viennese-trained landscape architect Wilhelm Meyer turned a drained swamp into Bucharest's first public garden between 1847 and its 1854 opening. Either figure makes it one of the very few survivors of that original planting scheme still standing. Popular legend has occasionally stretched its age to 300 or even 500 years, a claim the park's own history rules out immediately: nothing could have been growing here before the marsh itself was drained in 1830. What is true is dramatic enough without embellishment. The tree has outlived a kingdom, two world wars, and decades of the regime that followed, only to lose a quarter of its living crown to a lighting cable trench nobody has since gone back to properly repair. It is still standing, still shading part of the park it has occupied for close to two centuries, its damage visible to anyone who looks up rather than hidden away.