The Old Plane of the Plantsoen

This plane tree was already standing before the park around it existed. The Plantsoen was laid out between 1835 and 1842 as a job-creation scheme, an English landscape park built over Leiden's demolished bolwerken, the earthworks that had defended the city until they stopped being useful. Salomon van der Paauw designed it, which is why there are no straight paths, why the sightlines keep opening onto the water of the Singel, and why there has been an aviary here since 1867. The register dates this plane to the 1820s and calls it the oldest tree in the park, older than the layout it stands in. Its formal planting band is wider, 1800 to 1850, so its age is somewhere between 175 and 225 years. Planes became the workhorse of European city parks because they put up with compacted soil, air that would finish off a beech, and hard pruning, which is why so many survive from exactly this period of municipal park building. Most of them went into new ground as young stock. This one, by the register's dating, was already a tree when the diggers arrived. Stand at Plantsoen number 1 and look up the trunk: the flaking bark gives the species away, and above it sits a crown that has had two centuries to fill out.