Graz protects eighteen plane trees as natural monuments, and the register records only one of them as an Oriental plane. This is it, standing beside a roadside car park on Münzgrabenstraße. The other seventeen are London planes, the hybrid that shades the Volksgarten and Schillerplatz. Platanus orientalis is one of that hybrid's two parent species, and in a central European street it is far rarer than its offspring. It was listed as Naturdenkmal 1014 on 1 July 1981, on a parcel of about 117 square metres, little more than a square of ground around the trunk. The city's register gives the owner as public. That is close to everything on record. Nobody has published its age, its girth or its height, and the most recent photograph we know of was taken for Wiki Loves Earth in May 2014. The tree is still on the official list with no note of removal, but we have seen nothing newer that shows it standing. If you pass it, tell us, and if you have a tape measure, a girth would let us put an age on it. It is a detour of its own rather than part of a walk: about three kilometres south-east of the Hauptplatz in Jakomini, and nearly two kilometres from the nearest of the city's other protected trees, the Schillerplatz plane.
seed balls dangle on long stalks and stay all winterAutumn colour
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.
Münzgrabenstraße (by the roadside car park), 8010 GrazYou can recognise it as the plane tree beside the roadside car park on Münzgrabenstraße in Jakomini, the only Oriental plane among Graz's protected planes. It is Naturdenkmal 1014.
Free. Stands beside the public Münzgrabenstraße at a roadside car park; viewable from the street.
In Jakomini, about 3 km south-east of Hauptplatz; bus stop and line not checked.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
