The Gülhane Nettle Tree

Istanbul protects this tree by name, which is unusual for a species most cities treat as background. The Mediterranean hackberry, çitlembik in Turkish, normally gets planted for shade and forgotten. This one is 23 metres tall with a trunk 145 centimetres across, and it holds a place on Turkey's national monumental tree registry at an age of 259 years, with the city's own municipal tree project publishing a page for it saying it has stood in Gülhane Park since 1759. Those two figures resolve to the same year, 2018, so the national register and the city are reporting one survey between them rather than two separate measurements. That is worth stating. What makes the number credible anyway is the species: Celtis australis is a tough, long-lived tree in Anatolian conditions, so 265 years is physically ordinary for it, which is more than can be said for some of the plane ages in the same register. It stands roughly 40 metres from the registered London plane in the same park, and the pair are the reason to come. Gülhane was Topkapı's outer palace garden and stayed closed to the public until 1912, so this tree spent its first century and a half inside a court garden and its last hundred years among people eating simit under it. The Topkapı courtyard plane is 300 metres away.