The Plane Tree of Albertplatz

This plane tree lives on a traffic island. Albertplatz is one of the busiest interchanges in Dresden, a circle of tram and bus routes in the Neustadt, and the tree stands out in the middle of it toward Bautzner Strasse, twenty-five metres tall with a crown roughly as wide as it is high. It was planted around 1885, when that ground was open and quiet. Everything else arrived later: the trams, the traffic, the night of 13 February 1945 and the long rebuilding after it, forty years of the GDR, and the Neustadt's more recent turn into the loudest quarter in the city. The tree has stayed put through all of it on its own island, which is the closest thing to a fixed point Albertplatz has. Dresden made it a natural monument on 3 January 1985, by the same council resolution that protected the oak on Fetscherplatz. A London plane is a hybrid of the American and the Oriental plane, and it was planted across European cities for exactly the qualities on show here. It takes heat, compacted soil and dirty air better than almost anything else with a trunk, and it sheds its bark in pale plates through the summer instead of letting the grime build up. Its trunk measures 3.30 metres round. Both the register and the city's own record agree on the figure, which is rarer than it sounds.