The Eighteenth Avenue Planes

Two London planes stand one behind the other outside the same address, and the city registered them as a pair in 2005, recording one as the north tree and one as the south. The north is 4.8 metres round, the south 4.6, and between them they throw crowns twenty six and twenty seven metres across over a street that is twelve metres wide. That is the London plane's entire case for existing. It was a chance hybrid, probably raised in seventeenth century Europe from an American sycamore and an oriental plane, and it turned out to tolerate compacted soil, road salt, drought and filthy air better than anything native to any of those places. Every industrial city in the northern hemisphere planted it. Portland planted these. The bark is the giveaway: plane sheds it in plates, so the trunk is a camouflage of cream, olive and grey, and the shed pieces lie around the base like broken crockery. Stand between them and look up. The two crowns have grown into each other and the street disappears.