The Third Plane of the English Garden

Caserta's monumental register now credits this garden with three London planes, and this one is the third thickest tree in the whole city register regardless of species, five metres sixty around and thirty metres tall. Only the cedar of Lebanon by the Palco and the garden's other giant plane, near the entrance, beat it. The English Garden was laid out for Queen Maria Carolina starting in 1786, one of the first landscape gardens of its kind on the European continent, informal and winding where the rest of the Reggia's grounds run in strict Baroque lines. Three planes surviving from roughly the same planting era says something about the site more than about any one tree: deep soil, an unbroken water supply from the garden's own network of streams and pools, and two and a half centuries without the hard pruning street planes usually get. Left alone, Platanus x acerifolia does not stay a tidy shape, it becomes what stands here, a straight trunk carrying a huge, high canopy. The register puts its age at roughly 150 years, later than the garden's founding but still older than the unification of Italy. Free to see once inside; the garden itself is a paid section of the wider Reggia grounds.