The Plane Tree of Dobrentei Square

Everything else on this square went. Twentieth-century clearance took Tabán's palaces, its cafes and its Serbian Orthodox church, and the oldest thing left standing on Döbrentei tér is a plane tree of about 115 years. Photographs from the 1900s and 1910s catch it as a young tree, which is how a Budapest history publication dated it, and FŐKERT, the city's parks company, carries it on its own register of notable trees. The trunk is over four metres around and the crown reaches about twenty metres, higher than the roofs beside it, and visibly lopsided, because the tree has never been able to spread toward the building at its back. It came through the fighting around Buda Castle in the 1940s that flattened much of this neighbourhood, and then through the rebuilding of the Elizabeth Bridge, when trees at the bridgehead were candidates for removal. District I gave it local protection in 2011 and fixed a plaque to the trunk. The beer garden at its foot took the name Platán from it, and generations have used the tables in its shade as a meeting point. A second plane stands nearby by the Rudas baths; this entry is the Döbrentei tér tree, the documented and protected one. The pagoda tree at Buda Castle is 350 metres uphill, the Tabán mulberry about 600.