The Tallest Plane Tree in the Netherlands

Three plane trees grow in a row beside Van Heylerhofflaan on Stadspark's edge, planted together around 1870, and one of the three has since measured 39 metres tall, the tallest plane tree ever recorded in the Netherlands. Its two companions are barely shorter, at 37.5 and 36.5 metres, which makes the whole trio a small, accidental grove of national height records rather than a single freak specimen. None of the three is the thickest tree in Stadspark, a title that belongs to a separate, unrelated plane elsewhere in the park, a reminder that height and girth are different competitions and a tree can win one without the other. Planted during the same 19th-century wave of park-building that gave Stadspark most of its current character, this row has had roughly a century and a half of steady, undisturbed growth along a riverside strip of ground with nothing overhead to compete with for light, which is likely the plainest explanation for why it, rather than an older or more storied plane elsewhere in the country, holds the record today.