The Blackfriars Champion Plane

Bute Park has fifty British-champion trees and more than 3,000 catalogued specimens, and this London plane earned its own designation in 2022: Glamorgan Champion, the largest of its kind recorded in the county. It stands at the south east edge of the Blackfriars site, where a medieval friary once stood before the Bute family's landscaping buried its footprint under lawn. The tree measures 612 centimetres round and 24 metres tall. Working backward from that girth using the standard method for estimating veteran trees in Britain, its age comes out at roughly 251 years on a good growing site or 307 on an average one, which would put its planting between 1715 and 1771. Either way it predates Andrew Pettigrew, who took up his post as head gardener to the third Marquis of Bute in 1873 and planted the avenues seen in the park today; nobody has found a record of who planted this one or when. The date range reaches back to the mid eighteenth century, when the first Marquis employed Capability Brown to landscape the Castle Green nearby, and Cardiff's own parks record says London planes near Blackfriars may date from that work. No source ties this specific tree to Brown by name, so treat the connection as circumstantial rather than settled. A blue plaque on the Champion Tree Trail marks it in the park.