The Oriental Plane of Jesus College

Edward Daniel Clarke, a Jesus College fellow and later Cambridge's first professor of mineralogy, spent the years around 1800 travelling through Greece, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, a journey that eventually filled six published volumes and made him one of the era's best-known explorer-scholars. In 1802, at Thermopylae, the narrow pass where three hundred Spartans and their allies held off the Persian army in 480 BC, Clarke collected seed from the plane trees growing there. He brought it home to Jesus College and had it raised into seedlings; one of them was planted in the Fellows' Garden the same year. Oriental Planes are long-lived, broad-crowned trees native across the eastern Mediterranean, and this one has had well over two centuries in an English college garden to put on size, now standing more than 25 metres tall. It is a genuinely unusual case among Cambridge's collected trees: not a symbolic gift or a scientific graft, but a seed one traveller happened to pick up at one of the most storied battle sites in Western history and carry home in his luggage.