The Great Planes of Europe

A plane tree does not need to be the oldest thing in a city to be the most memorable. These ten, one per city, got their reputations from a bench eaten alive, a botanist's afternoon walks with Mozart, a bridge widening that moved two full-grown trunks by raft rather than fell them. None are ornamental additions to a park; each is the reason people know that particular corner at all. Start in Dublin, where a Victorian bench has been losing a very slow fight for decades.

Dublin

The Hungry Tree 100 years

A cast iron Victorian bench has been disappearing into this plane for decades, and the tree is winning. Bark now spills over the seat's arms and back inside the gates of King's Inns, Ireland's school of law since 1541.

Vienna

The Mozart-Platane 245 years

Its memorial stone calls it the Jacquin-Platane, after the botanist who planted it around 1780, but almost nobody in Vienna uses that name. Mozart walked past it often enough on his way to piano lessons at the planter's house nearby that the nickname stuck instead.

Paris

The Buffon Plane 240 years

Planted in 1785 by Buffon, then the most famous scientist in Europe, one of three oriental planes he put in the garden he had run for half a century. This is the sole survivor.

Brussels

The Oriental Plane of Parc Leopold 200 years

The thickest tree of its kind anywhere in Brussels, measured at 6.48 metres around in 2023, in a park built over a vanished stream. It only joined the region's legal heritage inventory in 2024, formal recognition arriving two centuries after the tree itself.

Bologna

The Oriental Plane of Piazza Malpighi approximately 200 years

Grows in a garden raised more than four metres above the surrounding piazza, ground once used from 1612 as a riding school for horsemanship before a noble family converted it to a private garden.

Naples

The Platano of San Severino regrown from a felled root since 1959

The tree standing today is not the one the Cloister of the Platano was named for, though it regrew from that tree's felled root after 1959. Legend credits the original planting to Saint Benedict of Norcia in the 5th or 6th century.

Milan

Platano di Indro age undocumented, likely 100-240 years

The largest plane tree in Milan grows sideways more than tall, a trunk 8.36 metres around, the widest of any plane in the city, standing about 50 metres from the statue of the journalist the park was renamed for.

London

The Cheapside Plane 250+ years

The only Great Tree of London within the Square Mile, growing in the churchyard of a church the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed and nobody ever rebuilt. By 1853 a cab company was already advertising its location as simply 'Under the tree, Cheapside'.

Amsterdam

The Leidsebosje Planes 165 years

When the city needed to widen a bridge in 1925, engineers floated these two fully grown planes sideways on rafts, roots and all, rather than fell them, after nearby residents objected loudly enough.

Verona

The Plane Tree of Piazza Indipendenza documented mature by 1941

A single trunk 505cm around fills most of the garden at the centre of Piazza Indipendenza, its 35.5 metre canopy making it one of the tallest plane trees recorded anywhere in Verona. Municipal records place it as already mature by 1941.