The London Plane of the Oude Hortus

This plane and the weeping beech nearby went into the ground the same year, 1876, on the same patch of former university botanical garden, and one of them has grown into one of the tallest trees in the Oude Hortus. The Dutch national monumental tree register measures it at 29 metres with a trunk just over four metres round, in good health on what the register calls a favourable site, a corner plot beside the garden's newer university building. London plane is the hybrid workhorse of European city planting, bred from American sycamore and Oriental plane and prized for tolerating compacted soil and polluted air better than almost anything else that grows this large, which is most of why it lines so many European streets and squares. This one, though, grows in a garden rather than along a road, part of a collection that began as a teaching ground for medicinal and useful plants in 1626 under the apothecary Henricus Munting. The Oude Hortus kept its historic site as public parkland after the university moved its living plant collection to Hortus Haren in 1967, so the garden today is walkable rather than a research facility. Free entry, about twenty minutes on foot from Groningen Centraal.