Westgate Gardens Baobab Plane

Canterbury has a plane tree that people keep comparing to an African baobab, and nobody quite agrees what it is. The trunk beside Tower House in Westgate Gardens bulges out like a barrel, 7.6 metres round by the figure Parks and Gardens gives and closer to ten by one photographer's caption on Wikimedia Commons. The sign on the ground calls it an Oriental Plane, and so does the city's archaeological society. The Natural History Museum's identification service, asked about Canterbury's swollen planes in 2014, concluded they are a clone of the London Plane carrying a viral infection. The sources still differ, and both names are in use. Visit Canterbury and Parks and Gardens put it at about 200 years old. The gardens' own tree trail calls it the largest and probably the oldest of its kind in the country, a local claim that no national register we have seen backs up. Local theory goes further still, holding that this is the parent of the city's other baobab planes, all planted by the nurseryman William Masters, who lived from 1796 to 1874. Nobody has proved it. Nor has anybody proved the rumour that the trunk once swallowed a bench. Standing beside it, you can see how that story got started. The gardens run along the River Stour, free to enter, five minutes on foot from Canterbury West.