The Second Plane of the Old City Cemetery

The register gives this cemetery two separate plane entries, and they stand half a kilometre apart inside the same walled ground. This is the second of them: a pair of planes on the path between sections two and four, with a planting band of 1850 to 1860. The oldest trees here date from around 1830, so these two arrived a good twenty years into the cemetery's working life, when the ground they shade had already been filling for a generation. That ground was laid out in 1833 to a design by Lucas Pieters Roodbaard, who also drew the Prinsentuin, which is why a burial ground reads here as a landscape garden with graves in it. Burials stopped long ago and the site became a national monument in 1967. What it has become since is closer to a wood. Ivy has climbed most of the trunks. Grey herons nest in the crowns, colonially and noisily, and they start early enough in the year that the racket arrives before the leaves do. The planes themselves do what planes do everywhere. The bark comes away in plates and leaves a mottle of cream, olive and grey underneath, which makes them the easiest trunks to pick out among all the ivy around them. Neither of the two has been measured, and the register is the only source that records them. If you know more about this pair than a planting decade, tell us.