The Plane of Sint Janskerkhof

Six metres and twelve centimetres around the trunk, and no other tree on this page comes within a metre of it. The plane grows on a square that spent most of its history as a graveyard. Sint Janskerkhof is exactly what the name says, the churchyard of the Sint-Jan cathedral, and the dead of Den Bosch were buried here until the ground was cleared from 1860 onward. The municipal register puts this London plane at roughly 170 years, which places its planting within a decade or so of that clearance: the burials stopped, the square was laid out, and somebody put a plane at the corner with Choorstraat. Since then it has watched the cathedral beside it spend more of its life under scaffolding than not, restoration on the Sint-Jan having run in campaigns from the 19th century to the present. The register grades its vitality as reduced, the middle category rather than the worst, so it is holding rather than thriving. One caution about the evidence: the register is the only source that names this individual tree. A 1996 survey of the city's oldest trees names planes among the species that make this quarter old without picking out this one. The Casinotuin trees are a few minutes' walk south.