The Plane of Square des Batignolles

The city has written down two birthdays for this plane, ten years apart. Its open register says 1850. Its printed fact sheet for the square describes a London plane planted in 1840. Either way, the tree is older than Paris's hold on this ground. Batignolles was a village outside the city until 1860, and the square was laid out under Alphand in 1862 and 1863, so on the city's own dates the plane was here before both. How it came to stand in a square that did not yet exist, no source explains, and we will not guess. What the register does give is its size, 604 centimetres round and 34 metres tall. There is one more wrinkle. The printed sheet covers two planes in the square, the 1840 London plane at 595 centimetres and an oriental plane from 1872 at 442. Only one plane here is in the open register, and its measurements sit much closer to the older tree, but no document joins them in so many words. A guidebook speaks of four planes standing here since the middle of the nineteenth century. If you can tell us which trunk the sheet means, please do. Sixty-eight metres away stands a Caucasian wingnut from the end of that century, so one visit covers both.