Il Platano della Biodiversita

Milan picked one plane tree in this park and started counting what lives on it. The city's monumental tree file calls it simply Platano VTA 43474, and it was entered into a research cycle measuring how much biodiversity a single urban tree carries in its crown and on its bark: the beetles, lichens, mosses, spiders and birds that treat 30 metres of plane tree as an address. The answer, in a city of 170,000 street and park trees, turns out to be a lot, which is why a tree with no legend attached to it now has a municipal page of its own. It stands about 30 metres tall on a trunk 1.6 metres thick, and its roots do something planes often do in compacted parkland: instead of diving, they spread flat across the surface of the root plate like poured wax. The city built a low wooden fence around the base purely to keep service vehicles off them. Its main limbs join the trunk at weak, narrow angles, so rather than shorten them, arborists tied them back to the trunk with anchoring cables. Almost nobody walking the path notices either the fence or the cables, which is the point of both.