The Three Planes of Buttes-Chaumont

These three planes had already spent fifteen years in a nursery when they were planted here in 1865, so they arrived in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont as teenagers. The park itself was still being laid out by Alphand's engineers, a job that ran from 1864 to 1867. That makes them about 160 years in this ground and older still in the wood. The city's own account of the park describes them as immense, with lumpy trunks and thick branches that climb rather than spread, standing mid-slope on a deep bed of ivy that runs down towards the lake. It calls them oriental planes. The city's register of remarkable trees disagrees and lists all three as the common hybrid, the London plane, which is the name we use until someone settles it. If you know your planes, tell us which it is. The measurements do not agree either. The park feature gives the largest trunk 6.70 metres round. The register puts it at 740 centimetres, with its two neighbours at 580 and 570, and all three at 30 metres tall or a little more. Take whichever figure you like for the big one. Add the three together and you get close to nineteen metres of trunk standing inside a circle ten metres across. They have watched every summer crowd come down this slope to the lake since the park opened in 1867, two years after they went in.