The Provost's Plane
Trinity College, Dublin 2
Trinity College's own estates team cannot quite agree on how old their most impressive tree is. One internal account points to an image of it from 1760; another puts its planting in the early 1800s, documented on the college's 1892 tree map, and its age at around two hundred years. Either way, it has been rooted at the corner of Grafton and Nassau Street since before Dublin had trams, and that turned out to matter. When the city's first tram line opened along Nassau Street in 1872, and again a century later when the Luas arrived, the plane needed pruning on a schedule built around a transport timetable, including nighttime work between midnight and half past three so services would not be disrupted. It now stands 31 metres tall with a canopy spreading nearly 30 metres, and a girth of 4.64 metres that took two centuries to grow. It shades a corner of the Provost's private garden behind a high wall, and most of the shoppers on Grafton Street a few metres away have no idea it is there.
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Getting there
Provost's Courtyard, No. 1 Grafton Street, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2
You can recognise it by its size, 31 metres tall over a trunk 4.64 metres round, standing behind the high wall of the Provost's garden at the corner of Grafton Street and Nassau Street.
Free, campus grounds generally open to visitors during daylight hours
Luas Green Line to Trinity, or Pearse Street DART station, both a short walk
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
