The Plane of the University Garden

This plane did not grow here. A plaque at its foot records that it was transplanted from the Place des Alpes to the Promenade des Bastions in 1878, and a tree big enough to be worth moving was already a tree when it made the trip. So 1878 is a floor for its age rather than a birthday. How much older it is, nobody has established, and the canton's register carries no planting date at all. What it moved into was the best address in Geneva for a specimen tree. The Bastions served as the city's botanical garden from 1817 until 1904, so a plane arriving in 1878 was being placed by people whose profession was placing plants. The collection later left for the lakeside. The tree stayed, and has outgrown everything the garden left behind. It now measures 5.38 metres around and 31 metres tall, under a crown 38 metres across, wider than the tree is high, which is what a plane does when nothing crowds it for a century and a half. The canton's inventory files its development stage as senescent. It stands alone facing the entrance on the university garden side, inside a ring of barriers whose purpose is to stop students chaining bicycles to it, and Geneva's city arborist describes it as looking rather like the king of the courtyard.