The Stecki Plane

This tree carries a professor's name because a district council asked for it. In May 2023 the Stare Miasto district put in a request, and the city council designated four London planes on Plac Wolnosci as natural monuments, attaching to each the name of a botanist or plant sociologist who had worked in Poznan. This one is Konstanty Stecki's. It stands at the north-west corner of the group, about thirty metres west of the Hejnowicz Plane and roughly the same distance north of the close pair on the southern side. The square around it is one of the more consequential rectangles in Polish history. The Bazar hotel at its northern end is where Ignacy Jan Paderewski spoke from a window on 26 December 1918, the evening the Greater Poland Uprising began, and the colonnade of the Raczynski Library has faced the same square since 1829. Whether this plane was already standing for Paderewski's speech is not something anyone has written down: the city dates the four only to the start of the twentieth century, which straddles the year. What is recorded is its health, checked by acoustic tomography before designation and found good to very good.