The Oriental Plane of J.C. Jacobsens Have

Most big planes in northern Europe are the hybrid, the London plane. This one is the real eastern species, Platanus orientalis, a tree of Greece and western Asia standing 5.80 metres round on a lawn in Copenhagen, which is a long way north of where it belongs. It grows on the round lawn at the western side of J.C. Jacobsens Have, about twenty metres from the honorary residence, on ground the Carlsberg brewer had laid out as his private garden in 1848 and which has been open to the public since 2009. Jacobsen planted the garden with trees he brought back from his travels; nothing records whether this plane was one of them, and no source outside the Danish Tree Register names the tree at all. The register surveyed it in April 2019: single-stemmed, 22 metres tall, healthy, with the bark low on the trunk noted as very uneven. That is the part worth walking up to. Planes shed their bark in plates rather than growing over it, and on an old trunk the shedding leaves a hard, lumpy, mottled surface at eye height that the neat grey column of a young plane gives no hint of. Nobody has dated it. If you know when it was planted, tell us.