The London Plane of Curtain Square

The most recent evidence that this tree is standing is from 2012. The City of Yarra's arborists surveyed Curtain Square in August of that year and recorded a London plane on the Rathdowne Street side of the park: 24 metres tall, 170 centimetres of diameter at breast height, which converts to roughly 5.34 metres of girth, since the register publishes the width across a trunk rather than the measure around it. Only one trunk on this page is heavier, the holm oak in Edinburgh Gardens. The age band on the record is 81 to 100 years, putting the planting somewhere in the decade after the First World War and the tree at roughly a century now. Nothing newer than that survey turned up. Squares here do lose trees: in 2017 Curtain Square's avenue of elms, some of them about a hundred years old, was cut down on safety grounds and replaced with scarlet oaks. That was a different avenue and a different species, and nothing suggests this plane was touched. Still, if you walk through, look and tell us what is there. London plane is a hybrid of an American and an oriental parent, crossed in the seventeenth century, and it turned out to shrug off soot, drought and butchered roots better than anything else, which is why it lines streets on five continents including this one.