The Plane That Grew Sideways

This tree is too small to qualify and the register listed it anyway. Campania asks a plane for four metres of trunk before it counts as monumental; this one has two metres sixty and stands nine metres tall, and it got in on the strength of a crown twenty-five metres across. The regional record calls it among the most beautiful and most photographed plants in the English Garden, which is an unusual thing for a government form to say about anything. The branching is what makes it. Instead of one trunk driving upward, the limbs leave low and travel outward in long sinuous curves that cross and interlace, so the tree reads as a wide low room rather than a column, and visitors come to it on purpose. The old royal gardeners knew it as the Indian plane, which it is not: Platanus x acerifolia is a seventeenth-century hybrid of the Oriental and American planes, and its bark flakes off in fine plates to leave the grey, cream and brown patchwork the species is known for. Come in January or February. With the leaves off, the whole tangle of branches is visible, and that is the only time of year you can see what the shape is actually doing.