The Great Plane of Hohenlind Park

The biggest-girthed tree found in this pass of Cologne stands in a hospital car park, more or less. St. Elisabeth-Krankenhaus Koln-Hohenlind was built in 1927 into a park that already existed, and the park is older than anyone at the hospital: a country estate stood here with its own grounds from around 1850, and a 1932 account already called the planting roughly 150 years old by then, putting parts of it back into the late eighteenth century. The plane that survived all of it measures 5.30 metres round, measured by the city in 2018 and easily the thickest trunk this pass turned up anywhere in Cologne. It shares the grounds with a second, smaller plane and a pedunculate oak about a hundred metres away, all three separately designated natural monuments on the same old estate. What looks like private hospital land is not: both the hospital's own materials and independent sources state plainly that the green space stays open to the public during the day, the grounds rather than the building. No age is recorded for the tree itself, only for the park around it, so treat the girth as the honest measure and the century estimate as a description of the ground it grows on, not a birth certificate.