The Plane Trees of Mgr. Nolenspark

Maastricht's most famous plane tree, the tallest in the Netherlands, stands about 240 metres from these three, and nobody has ever put an age on it. This trio does have one, of a sort. The national register places them in the planting years 1880 to 1890, roughly 136 to 146 years, and its own history note says they presumably date from the 1886 expansion that carried the Stadspark westward into Mgr. Nolenspark and Henri Hermanspark. Presumably is the register's own word and it is the honest one: the expansion is documented, the year these three went into the ground is not. Three planes of one generation standing together read differently from a single record-breaker. This is a stand rather than a specimen, the kind of planting a nineteenth-century park designer made because the London plane took coal smoke, compacted soil and hard pruning better than anything else available, and because a row of them would eventually close overhead. No source beyond the register names these three individually, which is the one thin part of their paperwork. Everything around them is better documented and closer than you would expect: the park's black walnuts, its weeping silver limes and its pair of tulip trees all stand within about a hundred metres, so the whole group is ten minutes of walking.