Qual è l'albero più antico di Rotterdam?

Rotterdam's tree ages tell a story most Dutch cities don't have to tell: almost everything old here either predates the 20th century's two great disasters or was planted afterward to replace what didn't survive them. The Park Plane and the Breitenbach Plane both cleared the German bombing of 14 May 1940 that flattened the historic centre a short walk from each of them, and the Park Plane cleared a second disaster besides, the 1953 flood that put much of the park underwater for weeks. That double survival is the actual basis for calling it Rotterdam's oldest confirmed tree rather than simply its most storied one; several other candidates are old enough to be plausible rivals but lack a comparably documented history reaching back before 1900. The Westersingel Plane, the Wilhelmina Linden and the Koningin Emmaplein Beech are all younger by a wide enough margin, planted within a few decades of each other in the 1890s, that the ranking among Rotterdam's oldest three genuinely rests on the two 19th-century-or-earlier planes rather than any of the turn-of-the-century additions.