Five streets meet at the Prudens Van Duyseplein, and when the square was laid out in 1883 it was laid out around this plane. The tree is what would otherwise be a traffic island. It carries a clear stem of seven to eight metres before the first branch, then a crown that reaches 28 to 29 metres across at its widest, with a radius of eleven. It is measurably still growing. The Flemish heritage inventory records it at 4.26 metres round in 2006 and 4.49 in 2013, both taken at a metre and a half from the ground, which is 23 centimetres of new wood in seven years. Nobody has established when it was planted. A date of 1700 circulates, but it appears in none of the heritage records, so the honest answer is that this tree is undated. If you have seen a source that settles it, tell us. What is documented is the protection, and it runs both ways. The plane has been a monument in its own right since 5 November 2013, and the square around it has been a protected townscape since April 1978. Locally it is not named after anybody. It is simply the tree of the square, which is what happens when a city builds a junction around a plane and then leaves it there for 140 years.
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Getting there
Prudens Van Duyseplein, Gent
You can recognise it by the bare stem, seven to eight metres of it before the first branch, under a crown nearly 30 metres across. It stands alone in the middle of the Prudens Van Duyseplein, where five streets meet.
Central Gent, on foot or by bike; De Lijn tram/bus stops nearby.
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.
