The Plane of the Pakhuisstraat

Four metres of trunk and nowhere to put it. This plane stands on the Pakhuisstraat by the aviary in the Oosterplantsoen, and the register, which otherwise calls it a perfect specimen, notes that the base is being squeezed by the pavement along the street. That is the standard fate of a big plane in a Dutch town: the tree keeps widening at the foot and the kerb does not move. The register dates the planting to between 1860 and 1870, so roughly 160 years, and it is the only source we have found that records this tree on its own. London plane came out of a seventeenth century accident, a cross between the American and the oriental plane that nobody planned and everybody planted afterwards, and it turned out to handle coal smoke, hard soil and heavy pruning better than either parent. Hoorn was a Dutch East India Company town whose walls were coming down through the century this tree went in, and the emptied ground became the walking park it now stands in. Look at the trunk rather than the crown. The bark comes away in irregular plates and leaves a camouflage of cream, olive and grey, and at four metres round there is a lot of it to look at from close up.