The Strzelecki Garden Plane

Krakow's main railway station has an old plane tree for a neighbour, 420 centimetres round, standing in a park most arriving passengers walk straight past. The Ogrod Strzelecki is a public garden beside the nineteenth-century hall of the city's marksmen's society, about a quarter of an hour east of the Main Square on foot. The two lists that carry the tree disagree on when it was protected. The national register says December 1966, the city's own published list says 1997. Same register number, same girth to the centimetre, so this is one tree with two dates on it rather than two trees. Its age comes off the trunk, because nothing records a planting. This page already carries two other London planes measured by the same register: the Filharmonia Plane at 520 centimetres, read as 150 to 270 years, and the Studencka Plane at 315 centimetres, read as 90 to 165. Placing 420 between them gives roughly 120 to 220 years. The band is wide on purpose, since a plane in a city grows at whatever rate the city allows it. The species is a seventeenth-century hybrid, oriental plane crossed with American sycamore, and it turned out to tolerate soot, paving and hard pruning better than anything else on offer. That is why it lines streets from London to Krakow, and why one of them ended up shading a garden next to a railway terminus.