The Oriental Plane of Landgoed Bantam

Left to itself in open ground an oriental plane spreads sideways rather than upward, and this one has had a meadow to do it in for about a century and a half. It stands free on the east side of the pond at Landgoed Bantam, an estate laid out as a landscape garden in the late 1870s and nicknamed Klein Zwitserland for its artificial hills. The hills and the ponds are still there, and so are the straight beech and oak avenues from the same period. The national register dates this plane to the estate's first years, giving a band that puts it at roughly 150 years old. That is a band rather than a measurement, and the register is the only source we have found for the tree, so treat the age as its estimate. Platanus orientalis is the eastern parent of the London plane that lines half the streets in Europe, and the difference shows in the leaf: cut far deeper, into five narrow fingers, closer to a maple than to its own offspring. The bark flakes in the same olive and cream plates. Individual trees of this species in Greece and Turkey are credibly reckoned at many centuries, so at 150 years this one is barely into middle age. The estate is managed as a nature reserve and open to walkers.