The Plane Tree of Sint-Servaasbron

The legend, recorded in the Middle Ages by Henric van Veldeke, has Saint Servatius striking the ground here with his staff on his way home from Rome, and a spring rising where it landed. A woman with a fever was said to have been cured by the water. People have been coming down to it ever since, and a procession still walks here every May. What you actually find at the bottom of the little stairway is nineteenth-century: a stone well under a wrought-iron canopy with a statue of the saint above it, built between 1886 and 1888 and now a national monument in its own right. The plane standing over it is dated by the national register to the planting years 1900 to 1910, roughly 120 years, so tree and stonework are near contemporaries. Whether the tree went in as part of that work, nobody recorded. The ground belongs to a religious institution, but the gate is a decorative Louis XV affair that stands unlocked, the register marks the tree as visitable, and the site is walked by the public year round. The spring itself is less reliable than the tree: a recent visitor account found it dry. The plane has company. Chestnuts and elder crowd the hollow, and the register lists a grove of 23 maples and horse chestnuts at the same coordinates, dated 1860 to 1870. Only the plane carries a name.