The Plane at Plantsoen 11

The London plane is a hybrid nobody set out to make. Somewhere in the 17th century an oriental plane from the eastern Mediterranean crossed with an American one, probably in a nursery, and the accident grew faster than either parent, shrugged off coal smoke and put up with having its roots under paving. Europe then planted it in every city it had. This one went into the Plantsoen in the 1850s, on the stretch of the park at number 11, more than a decade after the park itself was finished in 1842. The Plantsoen was Leiden's first proper public park, cut into the line of the old defensive bolwerken between 1835 and 1842 as work for the unemployed, to a design by Salomon van der Paauw, and it is now part of the Singelpark, the green ring the city has been stitching back together around its historic centre. The register notes that no other part of that ring carries as many different old trees. Bark is the thing to look at here. Planes shed theirs in irregular plates, one reason they cope with dirty city air, and it leaves an old trunk looking like military camouflage in cream, olive and grey. This one has had roughly 170 years of shedding, and it stands on the water, which is the view the whole park was drawn around.