The Studencka Plane

Krakow's biggest registered plane, on the Planty by the Philharmonic, measures 520 centimetres round. The one outside ul. Studencka 25 is a third smaller, 315 centimetres, and still made the city's natural monument register in 1997 on its own merits, a full street away from the Planty ring in the old Piasek district. Its age is arithmetic rather than record. Working the girth through the growth factor already used for its bigger relative on the Planty, borrowed from American sycamore since no rate has been published for London plane itself, puts it somewhere between 90 and 165 years old. That is a wide bracket on purpose. Nobody has cored the trunk, and a tree growing between a road and a row of nineteenth century apartment blocks answers to the paving and pipes around it as much as to its own species. London planes were planted through Krakow by the hundreds a century or more ago because almost nothing kills them: not compacted soil, not exhaust, not a hard prune. This one has outlasted whatever stood on Studencka before it, on a street that has changed its own name four times since 1893 while the tree kept growing. Free to walk up to, any hour.