The Tall Plane of the Isla de Arantzadi

A plane tree more than 40 metres high stands on a scrap of island in the Arga, and the black poplar beside it, at 37 metres, is the shorter of the two. The place is the isla de Arantzadi, by the San Pedro bridge, a patch of riverbank woodland where Pamplona's 2010 book of old and singular trees finds ashes, willows, poplars, chestnuts, oaks and maples growing together. Two of them made the book. The plane, magnificent in its words, measured 3.5 metres round at chest height, which is not much waist for that much height. The poplar is the stouter tree, 5 metres round. This ground was once an elm grove, and a few loose elms still stand among the rest. The book does not say what became of the others. It does record what happened to elms across the city. Dutch elm disease killed more than 11,000 of them in Pamplona in 1985 and left the city, in the book's word, half-naked. Several hundred of the elms lost in that decade were over a century old. From the island the book points out the silhouettes of the giant sequoias, the Spanish fir and the holm oak at the Arantzadi swimming pools. Nobody has put an age on the plane. If you know it, tell us.