The Oriental Plane of the Orto Botanico

Lightning opened this plane from the base upward and it kept going. The trunk is hollow, a shell you can see into, and the tree still leafs out every spring, because the tissue that carries water sits in the outer wood rather than the core. It went into the ground in 1680 according to the garden's own visitor leaflet, which puts it at about 345 years, and it has been measured at 6.2 metres round and nearly 25 metres tall. Worth being precise about the species: this is Platanus orientalis, the eastern plane, native in Italy only in a few pockets of Calabria and Sicily. Almost every tree called a plane in a European city, including two others on this list, is the hybrid that came later. The date rests on that leaflet and on Italian garden-history sources agreeing on the same two details, the 1680 planting and the lightning strike, rather than on a second register entry, so read it as well corroborated rather than documented twice. What the tree's first century looked like from here: Venice still ruled Padua and had another hundred years of republic left, and the botanical garden around it was already 135 years old and busy cataloguing plants arriving from the Americas. The register rates its condition as good.