The London Plane of the Reservoir

A tree with more than one trunk is hard to age by the usual rule of thumb, and that uncertainty is most of this one's story. The London plane on the Bridle Path near East 96th Street rises just over ninety six feet from a base that splits into multiple trunks fused so thoroughly that its combined diameter tops five feet, bark mottled in patches of green, tan and grey that one NYC Parks writer compared to an impressionist canvas. The claim attached to it, that it was planted around 1862 when the Reservoir beside it was first excavated, comes from one nature writer's educated guess rather than any planting record, which makes 'possibly the oldest tree in Central Park' a title worth repeating with the word possibly intact. A rival candidate exists across the park, a black tupelo in the Ramble that one book on the city's great trees dates to 1858, four years earlier, an argument nobody has settled because neither tree came with a receipt. What is not in dispute is the setting. The Reservoir's running path carries thousands of people past this trunk every week, most looking at the water and the skyline reflected in it rather than down at the multi-trunked plane that has, by the most generous reading, watched the water since before the Civil War.