The Filharmonia Plane

Krakow protects ten London planes on the Planty ring, and this is the one that dwarfs the other nine. Its trunk measures 520 centimetres around, comfortably the largest girth in that group, which is what earned it a place on the city's natural monument register in 1997. Nobody has dated it. What exists is the girth, and running that figure through a published growth-factor method puts the tree somewhere between 150 and 270 years old. The band is deliberately wide. The calculation borrows its growth rate from a related American species because no factor for the London plane was found, and a tree standing in a city grows at a speed no formula can know. Read the number as an estimate taken off the trunk rather than a birth year. The park underneath is better documented than the tree in it. Planty was laid out in the 1820s, after Krakow pulled down its medieval walls and ringed the Old Town with gardens instead. Nothing records when this plane went into that ground. Nor is the register any guarantee of survival: two other protected trees in the same part of the city, a red beech by the Archaeological Museum and a horse chestnut on ul. Podzamcze, were brought down by storms in February 2022 and July 2021.