The Plane of the Scuola Botanica

Two sources have looked at this tree and come back with two different species. One calls it an oriental plane, Platanus orientalis. The other calls it Platanus occidentalis, the American sycamore. They agree on everything else: planted in 1808, in the arboretum of the Scuola Botanica, still there. The disagreement is less embarrassing than it sounds, because the two species named are the parents of a third. The London plane is their natural hybrid, and most of the old planes of European streets and gardens turn out to be that hybrid rather than either parent. A two-hundred-year-old Italian platano filed under two names at once is an ordinary kind of confusion, and it is why this page will not commit to more than Platanus. Somebody standing in front of it with a fruit cluster in hand could settle it in a morning. What is certain is that the tree survived an edit. When Theodore Caruel reorganised the Scuola Botanica in the late 1800s, laying out new beds in new orders, a handful of specimens were too well established to move and simply stayed where they were. This is one of them, along with the Virginia oak planted twenty-one years after it. One source puts its height at 23 metres. The leaves are the tell: cut almost to the midrib for the oriental parent, broad and shallow for the American. Tell us what you find.