The Ravenscourt Park Baobab Plane

A virus is the best explanation anyone has for the shape of this tree. It carries a swollen, knobbled trunk under a crown far too small for it, the signature of the rare Baobab group of London plane, a form believed to come from viral infection rather than ordinary growth. Few are known; the closest comparable specimens grow in Canterbury. Nobody can say how old it is, and the sources sit far apart. A specialist plane blog puts its planting somewhere in the nineteenth century, so 150 to 225 years. A local tree firm reckons closer to 100, while allowing it might date to 1812, when the park was the private estate of George Scott. The same firm repeats a story that a wartime bomb damaged the tree and that the regrowth explains its shape; no other source carries it, so treat that as local legend until one does. What is documented is stranger. The arborist Richard Moore took cuttings from this exact tree. Two of six rooted and now grow at a sculpture park in Dorset, still far too young to show whether the swelling travels with the cutting or belongs only to the parent. It is one of two Great Trees of London inside Ravenscourt Park, standing south of the lower grassy area near the elm avenue, five minutes from the District Line station, and it is unmistakable once you are in front of it.