The Plane of Via del Fosso

Via del Fosso has a canal running down the middle of it, open to the sky, and this plane grows on the bank. That is most of the explanation for a trunk three metres sixty round and a crown thirty metres up. A London plane with permanent water at its roots and a straight open corridor of light above the channel has nothing to compete for. The fosso is a working watercourse, not an ornament. It was cut to bring water into Lucca for mills and workshops, it runs down the eastern side of the walled city on the line of an older moat, which is what the name means, and it still runs. The street it makes is one of the quietest inside the walls and it is the natural route between the botanical garden at one end and Villa Bottini at the other, so this tree is on the walk whether or not you went looking for it. The national monumental tree register lists it and gives the measurements. It does not give an age, and nothing else published names this individual tree. Planes are hard to read by eye in any case: put one somewhere it likes, as this one plainly is, and it will build a trunk several times faster than an oak on the same street would.