The Plane Tree of the Harmonie

In 1991 a reader wrote in to a Leeuwarden local-history paper to defend this tree. Renovation work at De Harmonie was expected to take out the plane beside the main entrance, and the letter asked the council to give way to public pressure, as it had done decades earlier over an old beech at the Princessehof. The plane is still standing. The beech is not. The register records it as felled in 2015, so the precedent held for a while and then it did not. The letter called it the plane by the Harmonie, more than a hundred years old, which undersold it considerably. The national register of monumental trees puts its planting between 1810 and 1820, closer to two centuries than to one. That band brackets the end of French rule in the Netherlands, which fell away in 1813, so the tree was a sapling in a city that had just changed countries. Everything around it has changed use at least once since. The tree has not moved, and it still holds the corner of the square where people queue to get into a show. Nobody has recorded a girth or a height for it, which is a gap a tape measure and one message would close.