The Dorchester Plane

One of the Great Trees of London stands at the front door of a hotel where a night costs more than most people's monthly rent, and you can walk up to it for nothing. The London Tree Forum and the Countryside Commission put this plane on their 1997 list of the capital's great trees, which was generous of them: the Great Trees map dates its planting to the early 1930s, making it younger than almost every other tree on this page by a century or more. The arithmetic is suggestive rather than proven. The Dorchester opened in 1931, and a plane put into a brand new Park Lane forecourt in the early 1930s fits that opening neatly, but no source actually joins the two facts, and the planting date itself comes from that one specialist record. What the tree unquestionably has is roots. Its root plate has risen clear of the ground and spread across the forecourt in ridges, the sort of thing a city normally paves over and here has been designed around instead: the hotel's recent refit tucked its garden underneath the tree rather than the other way round. It has stood through the Blitz, when the hotel's reinforced concrete frame earned a reputation for being bomb-proof and politicians and generals moved in for the duration, and through ninety years of Park Lane traffic since. You see it from the pavement. No need to go inside.