The Latimer Square London Plane
After the earth shook on 22 February 2011, Latimer Square became a field hospital under its own trees. The quake killed 185 people, New Zealand's deadliest disaster in decades, and the injured were triaged here in the minutes after. This London Plane, the widest trunk in the square's ring at 503 centimetres round, stood over all of it. Latimer Square is one of Christchurch's four original squares, surveyed in 1849 and 1850 and planted since with a ring of deciduous trees. The city's register counts 28 plane and elm candidates at this site; this one carries the largest girth, a fraction over five metres round, under a crown 19 metres high, and it is classed as a veteran, the register's top age band. Nobody has published a planting date for it. That is not unusual for a square this old: the trees were part of the landscaping rather than individual gifts, so no single ceremony marks when any one of them went in. What the record shows instead is what the tree stood over rather than when it started, an emergency rather than a beginning. If you know its age, tell us.
Latimer Square, central Christchurch You can recognise it by the widest trunk in the ring of planes and elms around the square, just over five metres round. It stands in Latimer Square, about 500 metres east of Cathedral Square.
Free. Public square, open at all times.
Central Christchurch, about 500 m east of Cathedral Square, on foot or the central city bus network.