The Plane Tree of Ayia Mavri

Cyprus put this tree on a postage stamp. The national post office's Centennial Trees of Cyprus series records the Oriental plane at Ayia Mavri as about 800 years old, with a trunk 8.20 metres round and a crown reaching 38 metres, and notes that it was formally designated for protection in 2004. A Limassol heritage survey, working from its own measurements, gives the same age and close to the same figures, 8 metres and 36. A third Cypriot site says 1,200 years instead and offers no measurements at all, so the age sits between two sources that agree and one that does not. Planes want their feet wet, which explains the address: the bank of the Kryos river, beside the small Ayia Mavri chapel, on the road linking Koilani to Pera Pedi through the Krasochoria, the wine villages of the southern Troodos. Platanus orientalis is the eastern Mediterranean's own plane, the species that shades village squares from Greece to Anatolia and one parent of the London plane that later took over northern European cities. On the lower estimate this tree was already growing when the Lusignan kings ruled Cyprus, and it has stood through the Venetian, Ottoman and British administrations since. Free, open, and about forty minutes of hill road from Limassol.