The Pococke Plane

Edward Pococke spent years in Aleppo and Constantinople as an Oxford scholar sent to master Arabic manuscripts, and returned in 1636 to become the university's first Regius Professor of Hebrew and Laudian Professor of Arabic. Tradition holds that he brought back more than languages: a seed of Oriental Plane, a species barely known in England at the time, which he planted in what is now Christ Church's Pococke Garden. The tree that stands there today has a girth approaching nine metres, by most measures the thickest and, by extension, oldest Oriental Plane recorded in Britain. Its own growth pattern complicates the story it is credited with, though: the shape and growth rate documented since the early 1900s suggest the visible tree may actually be a rooted layer, a branch that touched the ground, took root, and grew into what looks like a separate trunk, dating from around the mid-18th century rather than being Pococke's original 1636 planting itself. Whether it is the original tree or its own regrown descendant standing in the same spot, it has anchored the same corner of the garden for at least two and a half centuries. Lewis Carroll, an Oxford mathematics don for most of his career, is thought to have drawn on it for the Tumtum tree in his poem Jabberwocky, the one the Jabberwock supposedly rests beneath.