The Eighteenth Avenue Planes
United StatesPortlandIrvington
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.
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
2407 NE 18th Avenue, IrvingtonTwo very large planes in line outside one house, with flaking cream and olive bark and crowns meeting overhead.
Free. Street trees on the public right of way.
NE 18th Avenue at Brazee, Irvington. Bus 8 to NE 15th and Knott, then four blocks east.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: City of Portland Heritage Trees (Portland Parks & Recreation), no. 269, 270
- portland.gov