The Oriental Plane of J.C. Jacobsens Have

This is an eastern Mediterranean tree standing 5.80 metres round in a Copenhagen brewery garden. Platanus orientalis grows wild from the Balkans east into Iran, and this one is 22 metres tall on a single stem on the round lawn west of the honorary residence, a long way north of anywhere it would seed itself. The garden explains the geography. J.C. Jacobsens Have was laid out in 1848 as the private grounds of the brewer who founded Carlsberg, and it was stocked over decades with trees he brought back from his travels. It opened to the public in 2009 and is a protected monument. Whether this plane was one of his own imports is not written down anywhere we could find, so the tree itself rests on the register entry that measured it in 2019 and recorded it healthy. Low on the trunk the bark has gone lumpy and uneven, which the surveyor noted specifically. Higher up it does what planes do, shedding in plates to leave the trunk mottled cream and olive. The leaves are the giveaway if you are comparing it with Copenhagen's London planes, because the oriental plane's leaf is cut far more deeply, into narrow pointed lobes that run most of the way to the leaf stalk.