The Second Plane of the English Garden

Caserta's monumental register credits only one tree in the entire city with a wider trunk than this one, the cedar of Lebanon at the far end of the same garden. This plane measures seven metres twenty around, which makes it the widest broadleaf tree the register has found anywhere in Caserta, plane, oak or otherwise. Platanus x acerifolia lines half of Europe's boulevards as a pollarded street tree kept small on purpose; nothing gets this wide doing that job. This one has had the opposite treatment since the English Garden's layout went in for Queen Maria Carolina in 1786: room, undisturbed roots, and nobody ever cutting it back. Twenty-five metres tall, in the lower stretch of the garden closest to the palace, the section finished first and given the longest run of any part of the grounds to grow into itself. It carries none of the low, sinuous branching that makes its garden-mate near the entrance famous for its shape. This one went straight up and simply kept getting wider, plain in form and enormous in scale, a different argument for the same species.