The Plane of Square d'Ajaccio

Four metres ninety of trunk, in a square you can cross in twenty paces. The register gives this plane 490 centimetres around and 25 metres tall, and the one independent survey of Square d'Ajaccio quotes exactly the same 490, which is the kind of agreement that makes a measurement worth trusting. The two sources part company on the species. The city types it as Platanus x hispanica, the London plane, the hybrid Europe planted by the million from the eighteenth century onward. The visitor guide calls the square's planes oriental planes, which is one of that hybrid's two parents and a genuinely different tree. The city's own inventory wins here, but the disagreement is real and it is the sort of thing you can stand at the trunk and argue about. Its age is documented nowhere. The same guide calls the square's planes century-old, and the square dates from Alphand's programme of the 1860s to 1880s, so a hundred years is a floor rather than a figure. The tree has therefore watched the Rue de Grenelle become a street of ministries and embassies, with the dome of the Invalides two blocks east, while doing what old planes do: dropping bark in camouflage plates every summer and putting on another centimetre of belt. It stands forty-five metres from a southern magnolia that is also on the register, two designated trees inside one small enclosure.