The Planes of Kenaupark

Three London planes stand together near the start of Kenaupark, planted in the opening years after the Zocher family laid the park out in 1865 over the demolished line of Haarlem's old city fortifications. The villas that now ring the park went up in the years right after, so these planes are older than almost every building that faces them, among the first plantings to go into ground that had been earthworks and moat a few years before. London plane is itself a hybrid, a cross between the American sycamore and the Oriental plane first bred in seventeenth-century Europe, prized for tolerating exactly the compacted, disturbed soil a newly filled-in fortification would offer. The register treats the three trees as one monumental entry rather than three individual ones, the group rather than any single trunk being the thing judged worth protecting, matching how the park's bald cypress grove a few dozen metres away is registered. They stand in the open on public parkland, free to walk past any day, close enough to Kenaupark's copper beech and lime that a single stop here takes in four of the park's oldest plantings at once.