The Great Planes of Europe

Photo: Declan Maher, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 100 years · Constitution Hill, Dublin 7

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.

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Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 245 years · Landstraße, 3rd district

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.

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Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 240 years · Jardin des Plantes, 5th arrondissement

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.

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Photo: Ben2~commonswiki (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 200 years · European Quarter

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.

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Photo: Aneta Malinowska (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · approximately 200 years · Malpighi

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.

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Photo: Giuseppe Guida (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · regrown from a felled root since 1959 · San Lorenzo

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.

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London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · age undocumented, likely 100-240 years · Porta Venezia

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.

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London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 250+ years · City of London

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'.

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London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 165 years · Leidseplein, Amsterdam-Centrum/West

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.

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Photo: Mauzzan (CC BY-SA 4.0)

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · documented mature by 1941 · Citta Antica

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.

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